I’m a 911 dispatcher, when I was in training part of my class was held at our county’s public safety training facility, where a lot of police, fire, EMS, etc. training is done.
One day we were there the same day they were running one of these kinds of classes.
We were in the cafeteria, and noticed a table of people who were being a bit rowdy, not out of control, but definitely louder and more boisterous than you’d normally expect to be in a somewhat lesser-used county government lunch room.
We noticed they had a case of cheap beer, and found out that they were volunteers for the dui training class. I suspect most of them were off-duty cops, they had that certain look to them, and let’s be real, where else do you hear about that kind of volunteer work? (I’ve looked and can’t find them around, I can find some schedules of when the classes are but nothing on how to volunteer for them)
I wouldn’t exactly call what they had going on a “party,” but they were definitely having a good time, and I’ve probably taken calls from people complaining about less than what they were doing.
I could definitely see one of these getting a bit out of hand if the wrong people sign up and whoever’s supposed to be monitoring the volunteers isn’t keeping on top of things.
I personally think it’s also just kind of a bad look for the chief to be getting drunk around his underlings.
No real point to this story, just kind of sharing my thoughts.
By and large, Mennonites do skew pretty crazy and conservative in a lot of ways, but I think it’s worth pointing out that there can be a tremendous amount of variation from one church/community to another, there’s not much in the way of a larger overarching organization, a lot of policies, beliefs, interpretations and such are sorted out at the local level.
Some Mennonite churches are practically indistinguishable from the Amish, but there are some around that are very liberal. I live in an area with a pretty large Mennonite population, and the churches kind of run the entire gamut from horse and buggies to some of the most modern and liberal churches I’ve ever heard of.
They do, like I said, tend to skew more towards the conservative end of things, but there is a lot of variation there.