How the Military Became Patty Bear’s Path Out of Trauma and the Mennonite Church

[rangerrebew]

How the Military Became Patty Bear’s Path Out of Trauma and the Mennonite Church
Vets   

By Natalie Gross | May 09, 2021

Growing up in the Reformed Mennonite Church, Patty Bear didn’t know anything about the military — only that her people were pacifists. Higher education and many secular professions were taboo, especially for women. She assumed she’d be wearing long dresses and bonnets for the rest of her life, like her mother and countless generations of female ancestors before her.

Yet after years of watching her mother endure alleged abuse from her father, whose ongoing feud with Mennonite leaders has made newspaper headlines for decades, Bear realized she wanted more than the future she had always accepted. And in 11th grade, she met an Air Force Academy cadet who would be her way out.

“I had no idea,” Bear, now a 57-year-old Gulf War veteran and retired commercial airline pilot, told Coffee or Die Magazine. “I couldn’t have imagined that my path out of that would’ve been the military or the Air Force Academy. I didn’t even know those things existed.”

https://coffeeordie.com/patty-bear-mennonite-to-military/

[unite for individuality]

“I had no idea,” Bear, now a 57-year-old Gulf War veteran and retired commercial airline pilot, told Coffee or Die Magazine. “I couldn’t have imagined that my path out of that would’ve been the military or the Air Force Academy. I didn’t even know those things existed.”

How many people waste their lives
never pursuing the options that are available
because the government schools never let the children know that those things exist?

I blame the school SYSTEM, not the teachers.
The SYSTEM deprives the teachers of education almost as much as it does the students.
Teachers never let children know what possibilities life offers,
because the teachers themselves have never heard of many of them!

The SYSTEM is designed to produce mindless, helpless, stunted, pajama boys,
forever dependent on the SYSTEM to do everything for them,
especially their thinking!