State Fair Incident and Its Broader Implications
I was involved in an “incident” at a state fair yesterday. It made me think about what’s happening to the world around us.
A Nostalgic Visit Turns Sour
I grew up near the state fairgrounds, and as a kid, I would often go to the fair every day of its 10-day run. It was a matter of honor among the kids I knew to sneak in without paying. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone to the fair and spent most of the day there. In all those years, I’ve never seen or heard of anything like what I experienced yesterday.
Reconnecting with an Old Friend
A friend I hadn’t seen for quite a while suggested that we get together at the fair. I thought it was a great idea. My friend is a professional photographer who writes and takes pictures for several suburban newspapers. Every year at fair time, he does “fair duty,” taking pictures of fair visitors for the papers. He takes a lot of photos.
The Unexpected Confrontation
As we walked around the fair, visiting our favorite haunts, my friend snapped off picture after picture as we caught up. Suddenly, a short, muscular man ripped the very expensive camera out of my friend’s hand. At first, we thought it was simple theft, but the man didn’t run very far, and he had two young sons and a teenaged daughter with him. He looked as angry as anyone I’d ever seen and started screaming at my friend. “I know what you are, you pervert. I’ve been following you. You came here to take pictures of young girls. You took a picture of my daughter. You’re a filthy old man.”
Trying to Explain
We tried to explain things to him and did our best to point out that he was guilty of theft, and that the fair was the ultimate example of a public space where the courts have repeatedly ruled people have no expectation of privacy whatsoever. He remained livid and said he wanted to smash the camera and destroy all the filthy photos on it. The daughter looked like she wanted to crawl into a hole. The two sons just looked confused.
Intervention by Fair Staff
At this point, a young fair staff member with a lanyard and a nametag appeared out of nowhere and told both sides that we were free to call 911. The guy was still hysterical and didn’t seem to want the police involved. I insisted that the staffer call the police. He was well trained and separated us while he made the call. While we all waited for the police, I asked him to suggest that if the guy would give the camera back my friend would delete the photo and we wouldn’t press charges for theft. He said he had already tried that and it didn’t work. The still-shouting guy clearly assumed that my friend deserved punishment for his evil behavior.
Police Arrive
Eventually, three police officers arrived. One talked to us and the other two worked with the enraged guy. By this time, the guy had located the photo of his family on the phone and showed it to the police, triumphantly insisting that my friend was a dangerous pervert. As he scrolled though the literally hundreds of photos on the phone he kept shouting, “look, there’s another teenage girl.” He didn’t notice how many pictures he had to scroll through to find each suspect photo. He had discovered a pattern, and he was sticking with it.
Resolution
We were still separated, so I couldn’t hear what the other police officers were saying to the guy. He was still angry, but he seemed to be losing steam. The police showed him my friend’s press credentials, but it didn’t seem to have much effect.
Eventually, my friend got his camera back, though the guy had completely drained the battery. We were told we were free to go, but they kept the guy there, probably to get him calmed down and make sure he didn’t come after us. We didn’t want to make eye contact with him so we walked away without looking back.
Understanding the Man’s Perspective
It would be easy to say the guy was suffering from mental problems, but I don’t think he was. He was articulate, and genuinely concerned about his daughter. At one point, I saw him hug his daughter and heard him give a very moving apology to her for having embarrassed her. His arguments made complete sense if you accepted his premise.
The Power of Pattern Recognition
Humans are very good at pattern recognition. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that helped us find food and protect ourselves from enemies, both human and animal. Humans with good pattern-recognition skills were more likely to survive and reproduce. In the end, we’re so good at it that we can see patterns that don’t actually exist. We see animals in the clouds, and after hearing a couple of stories about vaccinated parents who later gave birth to autistic children, some of us conclude that vaccines cause autism.
The Role of Media
What’s changed, though, is that we now live in a world where cable news and social media have trained people to believe that there are perverts, pedophiles, child-molesters, and groomers lurking behind every rock and tree. It’s a fairly safe bet that the rage this guy carried came from consuming the fecal output of professional dog-whistlers like Alex Jones, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the interchangeable pinheads doing Rupert Murdoch’s bidding.
The Impact of Fear-Mongering
Stephen Miller, one of former-president Trump’s closest advisors, and a devoted soldier in the army of unprincipled dickheads whose mission it is to scare the shit out of gullible pattern recognizers, said in a recent interview, “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the number one traffickers of children, girls, into sex slavery on planet Earth.”
These heartless bastards are doing this, not to helpfully warn people about dangers they need to be aware of, but to gain money and power. This is why they oppose science and education, and have worked so diligently to destroy public education. Educated people know science proves that vaccines do more good than harm. They know that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens, and that the taxes they pay outweigh what they cost us. They know that there is no army of dangerous brown people surging across the border to rape and murder them. They also know that climate change is an existential threat to humans.
The True Culprits
The vicious, rich assholes that foment fear and anger over these issues, and the obscenely rich fucks who support them, know that they are spouting dangerous bullshit. They don’t care. They’re not going to lose a moment’s sleep over the fact that they’re turning the world around us into an angry crap fest, and it’s a sad irony that I respect the guy who threatened my friend more than they do.
