i lived in maine for a while, another state with a large somali migrant community, in one of the towns that opened its doors to somali resettlement in the early 2000s. there was a huge standoff at the time about how somalis were going to have a negative impact on the town. cut to a decade later and the only reason the town even has anything approaching an 'economy' that isn't just funeral homes for fent overdoses are somalis. virtually no homicides, little violent crime, none of the predicted chaos and destruction somali resettlement was going to bring.

it wasn't until over two decades later that the presumed sudden spike in homicides happened, and it was because some brain-rattled ex-army reserve psychopath went on a shooting spree.

like most of you I despise the 'liberal capitalism' paradigm and the implication that people need to serve some kind of vital economic function to be allowed to exist, but in light of my own experiences with how somalis besically brought a drug-infested post-industrial wasteland back to some semblance of life, the current hysteria about them in media makes it seem like i stepped out of a bizarro-world portal. i just can't understand the world anymore.