My Trip to Feast of the Hunters' Moon or Discussion With A Wall

Last weekend, starting on Friday, I went with an Away Team from the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, journeying for 530+ miles and ten hours (and a bit of change) with four other people in a ten-passenger Ford Van, towing a 14-foot trailer from Minneapolis, MN to West Lafayette, IN. Our destination was Historic Fort Ouiatenon Park outside West Lafayette, where we'd be camping for the next two nights. Once we arrived, set-up was in order: two canvas wall tents for sleeping, cots and bags and gear related to tenting, and gear for two days' worth of activity. Activity which also needed a tent, a 14-foot canvas affair with a full wall to house tables, shelves, seating- everything you need to demonstrate and sell at an event.

The event? The 49th annual Feast of the Hunters' Moon, a re-creation of the annual fall gathering of the French and Native Americans which took place at Fort Ouiatenon, a fur-trading outpost in the mid - 1700s. It is held annually in early autumn on the banks of the Wabash River, four miles southwest of West Lafayette, Indiana.

The 13-hour day was rough, made more so by the fact that I was (and still am) battling an ear infection and bronchitis, but it eased and moderated when we were finished setting up and could relax for a while before the show began the next day. Cocktails were had. Cards Against Humanity was played. Hilarity ensued.

Saturday was busy, as it always is at this event. We wound up hosting some re-enactors, as we always do at this event. One group came in and played Pope Joan, a multi-player game good for filling in spaces between re-enactment. It's historically accurate as well, so they bought a set. One of them came back later to fetch the woman from whom they'd bought it for help - she's a bona-fide people person and a collector of people, and in the course of helping them to refine their understanding of the game, she befriended them.

Jump to after-hours: dinner in our bellies, cocktails in hand, playing Cards Against Humanity again, and one of the re-enactors stopped in to say hi. He stayed for a bit, talked for a bit, then left to refill his own cocktail. Our staff - the one who'd gone to play the game with them - was worried that we'd scared him off with our CAH shenanigans, what with the raunchiness of the game. She forgot about that in the buzz of other activity, and the game went on.

We moved on to other after-hours catching-up pursuits after our game was finished, the rest of the staff and our guests eventually drifting off to bed as it got later. I was up with our camp cook, about to call it a night myself, when our new re-enactor friend came back. We talked for a bit, then he got around to what he'd really wanted to say in coming back: he'd overheard some of our talk throughout the day and he realized that we're not, but he's definitely going to be voting for Trump.

Oof.

For my own part, I can't fathom how anyone can support him. Period.

That in mind, though, it struck me as an interesting opportunity: I've asked a number of times why anyone would, in a number of different settings. The most common response? None at all. I thought I might get a chance to hear a different side.

I was glad that both women who'd made the trip were already asleep, though - the very notion of Trump support immediately shuts them down almost completely, and I fear there'd have been an ugly scene had either or both of them been awake. As it was, the camp cook and I listened to our new friend lay out his reasoning.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not as much a follower of politics as I should be. While I could have refuted his points with "No! You're wrong!", I refrained. Our camp cook is well-versed in many things, political discourse included. He handled much of the rebuttal eloquently and calmly as I listened, but our friend was unswayed. Indeed, he seemed not to be listening to any of it.

Without going into a lot of detail, the re-enactor's support stems mostly from his displeasure with The State Of Things. Fair enough, that.

He interrupted himself countless times to disclaim, "Do I support everything that he says? Fuck no!", which I took to be his way of discarding the most unsavory portions of a disturbing collage of wholly-unsavory philosophy. Eventually his main motivation came out: he and his wife run a cleaning business which employs a handful of people, and he can't afford insurance for his employees or for himself.

Naturally, that fuckin' Obamacare is to blame.

With a $15 minimum wage, he'd have to raise his rates to the point where he'd price himself out of the market.

Naturally, Trump is the answer.

He'd hear nothing to the contrary. Respectful/non-abusive attempts to illustrate problems with Trump immediately shut him down almost completely, and had the camp cook - who'd timed out on our friend's shutdown - or I dug in our heels, an ugly scene might well have followed. As it was, we were still friendly enough despite our differences as he began to beg off, citing the lateness of the hour, but we became as heated as we would get that night when he said, "And that Black Lives Matter bullshit - pull up your pants and get a fuckin' job!".

Then I did dig in, and without making a long story longer, I laid out a defense for my postion: no freedom 'til we're equal.

And it was like talking to a wall - my increase in emphasis and volume had little effect other than what you'd expect from emphatic loudness in an encampment of canvas tents in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. So I pushed in the clutch, we agreed to disagree, and we shook hands.

In the epilogue, I'm struck by his willingness to grasp a couple of vague promises and outright dismiss so much negativity and dishonesty. I'm struck by his willingness to put his own interests before that of 325 million other people. I'm struck by his belief that anyone claiming unfair conditions should sit down and shut up. I'm struck by his refusal to entertain any contrary notion, even briefly.

But I learned something.

Helping!

One of my Facebook friends posted this picture recently, with a bit of vague affirmative text as a caption. It struck me immediately in a visceral kind of way, neither negative nor positive. Mostly because of how I had a million other things on my plate at the time.

So I grabbed it, confident that I had something to say about the message: "People you help may harm you in the process. Don't ever help anyone."

That's what I got from it, anyway.

Today I'm back at my mindless job, one which takes up all of a third of one compute cycle in its most trying moments. Currently I'm stuck waiting on other people to do their mindless jobs while my work piles up- I can't do a thing until they've finished.

So my mind wandered, and in wandering, it settled on that image. Instead of funny cat videos. Or sports stats. Or girls in bikinis. Or a million other things it could've settled on.

The message "don't help because you might get hurt" is a pretty disgusting one, I think. It implies that you're helping for your sake, not theirs. And THAT implies that you're helping because you think someone is watching. Because you're hoping for some kind of reward. Or because you're afraid of being punished for not helping.

If you want to help, just do it. Don't expect "karma" to win the lottery for you in exchange for your deed, and don't go looking for a ticker-tape parade. Sure, you'll get a few pats on the head. Maybe even an occasional cookie.

The sad fact is this: most times, helping will bite you in the ass.

Preface/disclaimer time, and then an anecdote.

I'm not comfortable around people, individually or in groups, and I prefer my own company whenever I can manage it. While this sounds antisocial, it really isn't. You wouldn't be able to tell from my attitude most of the time, but the pool of people whom I genuinely dislike is very small- I'd not even have to remove my shoes and socks to count them.

That's not to say that I'm some kind of Gandhi figure - not even a little bit! I'm quick to judge and quicker to anger, I can be mean and uncharitable, and I have a lot of trouble putting myself in others' shoes. At the same time, I'm quick to forget and don't hold much truck with grudges. I like most of the people I meet, and even with the ones I don't really so much, I can find some kind of redeeming feature of them. I wish them well, one and all. We're all in it together.

A little less than a year ago, I gave up my second job after my wife graduated from college and started work. I'd been cashiering in a gas station on my days off for about 14 months, and as you might expect, I met a lot of people during that time. All kinds of them: locals, long-distance travelers, drunks, addicts, harried parents, irritated commuters, regular people, people who think gas station cashiers are beneath their notice, talkers, crazies of all stripes... All manner of humanity came through the doors.

I had a lot of small-talk practice during that time being around the regulars whom I got to know fairly well, as well as all the single-serve folk. This is something I'd been without for a long time: plain old, garden-variety contact. I'm not a shut-in, I'm not agoraphobic. Generally I don't go out if I don't need to, but there's nothing physical or mental preventing me from doing so. I simply like my own place, and I REALLY like people best when they're somewhere else.

It wasn't this year's Easter Sunday - because I no longer had the job - but in 2014. I was working a shift at the gas station as I was off from my full-time job, and a woman dressed for Easter (think church, not bunnies) came in after pumping gas. She used the restroom, wandered the store, and picked out a few other items for her travels, but it was when she tried to pay for everything with a money order that things went wrong. The store I worked for didn't and doesn't accept them as payment, and that was all the woman had.

No cash. No cards. No checks. Nothing.

I was working with the assistant manager at the time, who was irritated and ready to call the cops on the woman for having a tank full of gas for which she couldn't pay. Thinking of how I'd feel in her place, with it being Easter on top of everything, I paid for her gas. And for the extra stuff she got to go along with it, because even though I'd have to work all of that shift and part of another to cover the cost, it's just money.

Right?

I wish I could say that I paid her bill with no expectations, but that would be a lie. Even though she looked the part of saintly grandmother, when I wrote my name and phone number on her receipt, I did it fully expecting never to hear from her again. A year-and-a-half hardly qualifies as "never", but so far my expectation has been met. I'd be less surprised to be abducted by aliens, or to learn that my cats speak english, or to discover that I'm Canadian royalty, than I would be to hear from her again.

That being said, I'd do it again, if the circumstances were right. Not because "the boss is watching and will be impressed". She wasn't - she thought it was a dumb thing to do, and judged solely on the matter of $50 +/- and whether I'd have it to spend on myself, she was completely right.

Not because "karma will even things out". It won't, because that's not a thing.

Not because "I won't be able to sleep tonight otherwise" or because "I get the warm fuzzies from helping" or because "It's the right thing to do". "Wouldn't be an issue", "I don't", and "Depends on the situation", respectively.

I'd do it - and try once again to leave my expectations at the door - simply because I'm trying to get better at putting myself in others' shoes. That, and while I have a tendency to judge and scorn people for being self-centered, for seemingly working to make the world a more difficult place to be for everyone else, I don't often follow my own advice.

So I guess my own drive to help - such as it is - is self-serving. I'll go back to funny cat videos now.

message to a friend and former co-worker

Well, there are nice people around The Fortress, but still I don't think there can be any valid comparison between the Empire and the FOS. Stormtroopers all come from the sociopathic DNA of Jango Fett, so I can't really believe it's in their nature to be "nice". I wouldn't imagine the nurture of the Kaminoans - who took the cash and built/bred/geneticfully engineered to specs without worrying over ethics - or the pervasive atmosphere of "relatively-low-ranking-soldier-in-the-Galactic-Empire" could lead to much possibility of "nice", either. There wasn't any "nice" I could discern within the Empire's command structure, and the top end of that food chain - Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine - was not only *not nice*, it was SILLY with evil.

Now, *that* being said, there isn't any obvious benefit to niceness within a military organization bent on maintaining the control it's established. To all appearances that control is largely unquestioned and nearly complete, so their drive to expand is implied. An organization with near-unlimited resources, mad for power, would continue to reach until they exceeded their grasp.

There *is* a benefit to niceness within a private organization bent on getting all the cash it can. Whether the nice is actual or apparent, it becomes important because the private organization can't simply demand unquestioning obedience of all of the rank-and-file - pesky labor laws and regulations and "worker's rights" nonsense. Nice comes into play at the top end of the organization where there's an image to project, and pervades the bulk of the remainder of the personnel structure as a means of social and professional advancement. Political maneuvering, for the most part, though genuine niceness *does* exist there. Genuine niceness doesn't seem to serve any practical function within the system, though. So probably it can be ignored.

I could speculate about the top end of the food chain at the Fortress of Stoopid. I don't suppose you make it to executive-level by being nice, though the executive-level people I know from the Fortress seem nice enough. On the other hand, I don't suppose that - operating within the confines of the present system - you can *remain* in an executive-level position by advertising your evil. Good in a military dictatorship, sure. Direct-mail advertising business? Maybe not so much.

So I guess the parallel between the two has to be the single-mindedness. The Galactic Empire had their thirst for power and control. Money might also be an issue, but that can be left for another time because money is the thing for the Fortress of Stoopid. The Empire fell because of their arrogance.

The Fortress? Incompetence might not bring it down, but they certainly suffer for it.