Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/essayist-gains-inspiration-from-the-amish-communitys-ability-to-forgive Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Essayist Anne Taylor Fleming reflects on the Amish community's ability to forgive the killer of the school-house shootings. She discusses how this characteristic is exemplary and should be practiced. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING, NewsHour Essayist: We have spent our week as heartbroken voyeurs of a way of life foreign to almost all of us, the simple life of the Amish: no cars, no cell phones, no electricity. A life so unfathomably simple to so many of us, quaint, kids in hats, women in bonnets, horse-drawn buggies.But what is most unfathomable of all is something that became apparent this week as the Amish community struggled with the ghastly schoolhouse murder of five young girls by a deranged, distraught father who then took his own life.The modern media world descended en masse into this rural enclave, as if dropped back through time, poking and prodding the grief of the families and the community as a whole. And what they found and what we heard from that community was not revenge or anger, but a gentle, heart-stricken insistence on forgiveness; forgiveness, that is, of the shooter himself. The widow of the shooter was actually invited to one of the funerals, and it was said she would be welcome to stay in the community.