The Night at the Fair

Time to talk about my time at the Olmsted County Fair this evening. Keep in mind, first of all, that Rich Peter(who I refer to as Dick Peter), the Environmental Health Director for Olmsted County, has been busy patting himself on the back for passing the ordinance that bans smoking at the Olmsted County Fair. Of course, that little prick doesn’t have any contact information on the web–I wonder why? Anyway, I brought my e-cigarette along in case I decided I needed some nicotine, which I did puff away at later in the evening.

I was at the Minnesota Majority booth at the fair. I must digress from the primary topic of our organization to tell you a little bit about my experience with the Minnesota Majority Booth.

I got their around 6:00, and relieved Donovan, who’s been putting in some serious time at the fair. He showed me the ropes, left shortly after, and then it was up to me to fend for myself.

One of the first people that approached the booth was a middle-aged lady who looked as though she wouldn’t support our cause if her life depended upon it. She asked what Minnesota Majority was all about, and I explained briefly, to which she replied, “I can see which flavor you people are”, and ubruptly left. I was about ready to leave after that.

But, luckily, for the next hour I had a bunch of people who really supported the cause. In the back of the booth was a very large banner that read, http://www.globalclimatescam.com/. This got quite a few people’s attention. Many of them thanked me for exposing that scam and an elderly guy said Global Warming was the biggest load of crap ever. But, about 7:30 an fifty-something guy stopped by, and was clearly fired up. He told me he saw the banner in the back of the booth and it was upsetting him because he was a high school science teacher and he did a lot of research and that it’s not a scam. I just let him complain, and he stormed off. A few minutes he re-appeared with a woman and he had his camera pointed at our booth. “I have to take pictures of this for my chemistry class; they’re not going to believe this!”

I smiled nicely for the camera and thought that it would probably be a good thing for his students to see the picture to help open their minds to other possibilities.

The rest of the night was uneventful, more people came up to thank me for exposing the truth, and it got pretty quiet around 9:30. So, I decided it would probably be a good time to close down the booth. As I was thinking about doing this, another older gentleman paused in front of my booth, and sparked up a heater. I was in awe, I wanted to thank him or congratulate him or something, but I didn’t want to draw attention to him. I just watched him walk away puffing on his cigarette and thought, “what a great guy. Dick Peter would have him arrested”

That wraps up my night at the fair. Keep in mind that Ban the Ban is non-partisan, and I don’t want to bring other issues into it. Ban the Ban is strictly about tobacco and private property issues.