Not everything is plain sailing. Not everyone is kind.
These 5 days highlighted to me how important it is to oppose hate and hate speech. After seeing my friends from home and filling up on their wonderful familiar faces, I camped at a state park called Humbug Mountain. The park itself was beautiful and had a hiker/biker area slightly separate from the main site as per usual. After putting up my tent and starting to prepare yet another delicious FEAST of single serving, packet ramen another guy pulled in.
We’ll call this man T.
The next two days were filled with the anxiety of trying to remove myself from the company of this hate filled man whilst maintaining my painfully polite English decorum. As you may have guessed by my pre-ramble this was not an easy task.
T had a violent past and was racist, sexist, homophobic and bigoted. He was dramatically religious, believed that muslims were the root cause of all evil and couldn’t master the idea that, irrespective of background or culture or religion, most people were just peaceful creatures who weren’t “out to get him”.
As the only two people using the site and with darkness setting in I realised I’d have to suffer him to some degree for the evening. The more comfortable he got explaining his xenophobia the more frequently he called me the absolutely deplorable “Babygirl”. I felt with this one I had to pick my battles, so I left it but grimaced and noticed parts of me were dying inside. I challenged every belief he had and was quite damning in my approach but somehow he still wanted to talk to me. I wondered how he got to this stage. Hate is learnt. How did he learn this?
The evening was an exhausting and uncomfortable mix of anger, debate and feeling ashamed that somehow that I’d given him a forum to speak such hate (however limited the audience was.) Was that ok? Should I have ignored him completely? What were the risks with that?
Either way; he spoke, I challenged and it all fell on deaf ears.
The night turned even more sour as he showed me his array of various weapons he’d decided to carry with him. Defence against animals. (Incidentally, every single American (bar one very honest man) owned guns for the use against wild animals. I wonder what the death count is for random animal attacks against Americans.) But I took that as a sign the evening had gotten far too intense and retired to the imaginary safety of my tent. Where I half slept, half panicked and ignored his bizarre attempts to lure me out of my tent with shouting about them “God darn wild animals!!”
T.B.C
bitter/sweet 