Plain to Plane
Jan. 15th, 2024 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spacefemI'm in a facebook group called The Aviatrix Book Club that picks books about women pilots every month, I've gotten some good titles from it but this month's was really interesting. Plain to Plane: My Mennonite Childhood, A National Scandal, and an Unconventional Soar to Freedom by Patty Bear.
I picked it up because I thought it'd be about airplanes, and it is in the end, she goes to the Air Force Academy, becomes a KC-135 pilot, then flies for the airlines. But this book is really about her life from about age 8-18.
I LOVE books about people escaping religious cults. This one starts out with her idyllic simple Mennonite life... flowers, farming, homemade food, innocent childhood games, bible stories. But her dad is one of these people who believes in himself and his authority above anything so when he rants too much against church authorities they kick him out of the church. According to their rules, his wife can't be with a non-church member but also can't divorce him, can't get help, she's supposed to "work on her marriage" even though her husband is increasingly violent and threatening and finally the family has to escape. He takes it all to the press, telling the world about how the church has torn his family apart through this totally unfair "shunning" practice.
maybe my love of ex-cult stories is a little schadenfreude but I pick these books up once a year or so and this one just totally absorbed me, it's a fast read, I got through it in about two days, couldn't put it down.
all these religious stories start with the same idea... someone is told that their life can be perfect if they FOLLOW THE RULES. But then the rules give them no way to reconcile the realities that come with humanity, and they realize that obeying authority has its own peculiar set of problems. They think their way out. In the end it's empathy, not authority, that saves them.
I've read memoirs by people who escaped the hateful Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, the polygamist FLDS, Hasidic Orthodox Judaism, Synanon cult in california. The Duggar kids are coming out with memoirs about how they started questioning Bill Gothard. Tiktok is full of ex-mormons, ex-Amish, ex-fundamentalists. I am fascinated by these stories of people escaping the brainwashing that goes on. They have to make such a leap. What determines whether a person will look around and only see what they know, or look around and realize there's more to life than this? Who gets sucked in and who gets out?
I picked it up because I thought it'd be about airplanes, and it is in the end, she goes to the Air Force Academy, becomes a KC-135 pilot, then flies for the airlines. But this book is really about her life from about age 8-18.
I LOVE books about people escaping religious cults. This one starts out with her idyllic simple Mennonite life... flowers, farming, homemade food, innocent childhood games, bible stories. But her dad is one of these people who believes in himself and his authority above anything so when he rants too much against church authorities they kick him out of the church. According to their rules, his wife can't be with a non-church member but also can't divorce him, can't get help, she's supposed to "work on her marriage" even though her husband is increasingly violent and threatening and finally the family has to escape. He takes it all to the press, telling the world about how the church has torn his family apart through this totally unfair "shunning" practice.
maybe my love of ex-cult stories is a little schadenfreude but I pick these books up once a year or so and this one just totally absorbed me, it's a fast read, I got through it in about two days, couldn't put it down.
all these religious stories start with the same idea... someone is told that their life can be perfect if they FOLLOW THE RULES. But then the rules give them no way to reconcile the realities that come with humanity, and they realize that obeying authority has its own peculiar set of problems. They think their way out. In the end it's empathy, not authority, that saves them.
I've read memoirs by people who escaped the hateful Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, the polygamist FLDS, Hasidic Orthodox Judaism, Synanon cult in california. The Duggar kids are coming out with memoirs about how they started questioning Bill Gothard. Tiktok is full of ex-mormons, ex-Amish, ex-fundamentalists. I am fascinated by these stories of people escaping the brainwashing that goes on. They have to make such a leap. What determines whether a person will look around and only see what they know, or look around and realize there's more to life than this? Who gets sucked in and who gets out?
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Date: 2024-01-16 02:48 am (UTC)I agree, it seems to be such a crapshoot.
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Date: 2024-01-16 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-18 05:09 pm (UTC)Similarly, I've read a lot of books about people's escape from non-religious controlling/abusive relationships in general. I am a big fan of true crime as well, and missing person cases.