Michael Janke

As we were leaving a campground the other day we were alongside a group of people with a rented camper. They were attempting to fill the camper with water and dump the tanks. Pretty routine for travelers with RV’s.

Those of you with campers know that there’s a pretty specific way of dumping and filling. Most dump stations have two places where you have access to water. The place closest to where you dump is used to rinse out the hose that you used to dump. That water faucet is generally considered unsafe to use for drinking water as it’s probably been contaminated by the dump process. The water source farthest from where you dump is generally painted blue and is considered potable water safe for drinking.

The family with the rented camper was using the unsafe or unclean hose to fill their drinking water. A man came by and suggested that they should not be doing that and that they’ve potentially contaminated their freshwater. It was clear that this was the first time they had rented a camper and that they were foreigners (Swiss) who didn’t have a full understanding of how things worked here, and a limited understanding of English. The man who corrected them gave them a brief introduction of how the system worked. Kudos to him. All was good.

While this was getting straightened out and the Swiss family was filling their fresh water tank from the correct hose, an older couple pulled up with their camper. He immediately started complaining about people who didn’t know what they were doing as though there never was a time in his life when he didn’t know what he was doing.

I told him that they were foreigners who are renting a camper for the first time and that they were still figuring this kind of stuff out. He immediately started complaining about foreigners in general. Apparently he’s never gone to another country where he’s been a foreigner.

He looked at my license plate (Minnesota) and started to tell me that as I’m from Minnesota I better watch out because foreigners were taking over. He said something to the effect of ‘you got them Somalis there, and you better watch out’. He was of course referring to the Somali community in Minnesota. Apparently he believes the far-right propaganda that claims that because we have Muslims in Minnesota we will have Sharia law.

I find it highly unlikely that he actually went to Minnesota and visited a Somali community. I doubt that he ever ate at a Somali restaurant. He probably never had a catheter inserted by a Somali nurse. He is ignorant in that he has no first-hand information about the community, yet has formed an uninformed position about the community and is willing to propagate it to strangers at a dump station.

Of course he doesn’t know that I live two miles from a Somali community in St Paul. I attempted a defense of the community, but I didn’t think fast enough and I’m probably not articulate enough. He drove off proud of himself for warning me of the grave danger I face. In his mind at least.

It’s sad that there are people in this country whose sole sources of information spew hate and fear and make money doing it.

Making money teaching people to hate.

Hate for profit.