Spend some time following internet conversations about your liberal cause of the day (global warming, racial injustice, etc) and eventually someone will get to the nut of why the issue pisses many people off: they think activists want them to feel guilty and they don’t want to feel guilty. That’s pretty much it. A huge part of our failure to do anything about the climate disaster or racist asshole cops comes from people protecting their delicate ego.
Take for example the reaction when Mark Lane, an apparantly wonderful guy and excellent dad who runs Poppa’s Fresh Fish Company in San Diego, took in a Guatemalan family of four who had been processed by ICE while they looked for family with whom to live until their court appearance.
Through the immigration advocacy group Border Angels, Mark Lane — a fishmonger by trade — and his family took in a Guatemalan family of four, who had recently fled violence. After the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency processed and released the Guatemalan family with notice to appear (NTA) slips, Border Angels founder Enrique Morones placed a call out to the organization’s advocates to find hosts for the family until they could make their way to a relative on the East Coast to await their immigration court hearing. “This is a matter of people taking in families and refugees,” Morones said, recalling to ThinkProgress that Lane was one of 20 eager volunteers. One Guatemalan family member reportedly stayed at a 24-hour money order business for nine days before Border Angels found out about her story and took her in. She was also allegedly raped several times during their journey to the United States and again at a shelter. The mom and three children (one daughter and two sons) are currently occupying one of two spare rooms in the Lane family home. “This family suffered trauma,” Lane explained. “They were so scared they piled into the same room. I let them bond with my wife in the first few days.”
[…]Since the Guatemalan family came to stay with the Lanes four weeks ago, they went from being “hollow-eyed and watching me” to becoming “more animated, more relaxed. They’re in a safe environment and it kind of feels like bringing home a baby from the hospital.” He recalled that the mother was anguished when he used Google Earth to pull up an image of the Guatemalan city they had fled from. She told him, “That’s where I should die a normal death, but we can never go back there. If we go back, we will get killed.”
Even if you despise everything about immigrants coming to this country without filing papers, every detail in this story looks above board. The family has been processed by ICE and needs a place to live until their court date. You would hardly expect conservatives to celebrate forcing people into government centers or on the street or to criticize private charity when it literally complies with the most restrictive possible reading of our immigration laws. It goes against the sort of things that conservatives usually celebrate, and in return all you get is gratuitous cruelty and extra crime as desperate people try to not starve to death. And yet.
[W]hen word spread that Lane was hosting the family, people viciously attacked him online with a Facebook page calling for a boycott of his business, Poppa’s Fresh Fish Company. One commentator on the now-defunct Facebook page recommended that he “needs a serious beating in front of his customers. But then he serves crap food. His establishment is rat infested and smells like raw sewage.” Lane said that he and his family have been also receiving death threats, which he said he has now reported to the local police department’s hate crime division and even the Department of Justice.
It seems senseless and stupid to hate this guy for what he did. But you can imagine how it would feel to have a guy’s humanity, compassion and basic courage reflect on the small, scared hateful way some people live their life. If a large fraction of folks will choose a painful shock rather than sit alone with their thoughts, imagine what people will do to avoid shame.
Give the guy some support and a little business if you pass through San Diego.
Davis X. Machina
America f&ck yeah!
A lot of people think “I need you to be as small and vile as I am, and I will hate you until you are. Then I can stop feeling bad about how small and vile I am.’
askew
Good for Mark Lane for taking in these refugees. Wish I lived near San Diego so I could support his business. I hope he realizes that these nutjobs attacking him are a small minority of the population. Most people are better than that.
Jebediah, RBG
Dismayed but not too surprised at the hateful reactions. Although it probably wasn’t part of his motivation, he is sort of rubbing their noses in the fact that they are mostly animated by hate and spite. Especially for bible-thumpers, since he is hewing to Jesus’ actual example. Good for him!
Linda Featheringill
Maybe we could go to Facebook and express our admiration to Mark.
the Conster
What the fuck is wrong with people? Seriously, what the fuckety fuck?
askew
FYI – For people looking to help out in the refugee crisis, there are a lot of great organizations that you can contact:
KidsPeace
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
If you are in Maryland, there is this great government website that has information on how you can help.
Barry
@the Conster: “What the fuck is wrong with people? Seriously, what the fuckety fuck?”
All people have some evil in them; for many, though, if the evil were to be banished (‘dispel evil’ from D&D), there’d be very little left.
Belafon
I see the good Samaritan story has been removed from the Bible. About the only thing left of Jesus words is “Get behind me Satan.”
elmo
Raised in the San Diego area from toddlerhood to my 30’s, but I don’t live there anymore. Shared on FB so my high school friends (what? I had friends!) can throw some love his way.
SatanicPanic
Looks like he’s got some solid Yelp reviews, who knows if that’s because he’s in the news. People are jerks, there’s just no getting around that. Yelp says he makes good chowder, so when it starts cooling off I’ll definitely head down there for some.
Iowa Old Lady
I admire the way Lane acted on his principles. It’s one thing to be sympathetic and another to disrupt your life to act on that sympathy.
The people attacking him make me tired.
Lawrence
This reminds me of all the death/rape threats that gun control advocates, or just women in general, get online. Don’t we have laws for this? Don’t we have spies monitoring everything we say and do online? Shouldn’t the cops have a better use for their time than sniffing around for a nickle bag of dope?
Villago Delenda Est
“Conservatives” suck.
Mean people suck.
You see the connection here?
Frankensteinbeck
@the Conster:
A lot of people feel their power to be casually cruel and be praised for it slipping away. They can’t talk freely about how young black males are scary gang members anymore. They hardly ever get to laugh at thick-accented, dumb but lovable black TV and movie characters. Women keep appearing everywhere, becoming part of every group and challenging their ability to paint girls as only interested in girly stuff. When they say god hates someone they get more disgusted looks than applause. They can’t use ‘nigger’ or even ‘negro’. I mean, look how the country bailed on Bundy when he removed the plausible deniability of his racism. They see this, and they’ve seen it for decades. They thought they’d hit a renaissance when 9/11 let them hate Muslims openly, but it’s already slipping through their fingers. Then the ultimate proof that they’re losing the privilege of being assholes happened – a black man became president. They want Asshole Rights now, and they’re not going to take it anymore.
boatboy_srq
@askew: Ditto everything except the last bit. Most people are not better than that, or this wouldn’t be a story. The Samaritan was noteworthy not because he was foreign but because he was merciful and generous.
Good for Lane and Poppa’s Fresh Fish Company. I have friends in San Diego: I’ll be sending them there.
I’m not so sure this is shame avoidance so much as acting on the PWE-gone-awry Reichwing FundiEvangelist Xtian message that those who have not are damned and deserve no mercy (as evidenced by their poverty). Between the Otherness of the refugees and the “enabling” of more Otherness, Lane is sinning against their most fundamental principles. One more reason that Xtians donning the Christian mantle when – and only when – it suits them really chaps my a##: given the chance they’d rather be the rabbi or the Levite than the Samaritan any day because the guy who got beaten and robbed and left to die by the roadside must’ve deserved it.
Villago Delenda Est
Speaking of people who suck, from Noisemax:
McConnell: I’ll Shut Down Obama After Midterms
Pretty much the same way you made him a one term President, eh, Yertle?
askew
@Villago Delenda Est:
McConnell gave an interview that basically said he’d attach riders to every spending bill that comes out the Senate and put an end to Obama’s agenda. If we lose the Senate, Obamacare is dead.
Our only hope is that McConnell loses to Grimes in Kentucky. He knows the Senate rules almost as well as Reid. Getting rid of him would help us immensely.
MT, WV and SD are gone for Dems. We are likely to lose one or two of these other seats – AK, AR, LA, NC, IA (thanks to a horrible campaign by the Dem). We have slight chances to pick up KY, GA and KS. But, this is going to be one scary midterm for Dems. We have to turn out.
NCSteve
Blatant racially and ethnically based hatred and fear is A-OK now, endorsed, encouraged and thoroughly validated by conservative thought leaders. As long, that is, as you insist you aren’t racist and accuse others of being the real racist for accusing you of being racist. Because yeah, otherwise, guilt.
Bobby Thomson
@boatboy_srq:
No, it’s because he was a member of an outgroup who you would have expected to leave the guy to die, but didn’t.
It would be like an Arab American rescuing Michelle Malkin.
Frankensteinbeck
…okay, I think I finally put together the reason for the gamer/geek hate that tries to exclude girls. If you’re a misogynist, girls have to be different. They can’t be people, just like you. Girls getting into what they thought were their male-only ‘girls don’t read comic books or play computer games’ clubs challenges all the justifications needed to view women only in terms of sex, and their pent up anger explodes. Then the sadists, who view women as natural victims anyway, feel empowered and go on the relentless attack.
That’s a good hypothesis that matches human irrationality. I’ll run with that and see if it matches evidence moving forward.
@Bobby Thomson:
Can I suggest it’s all those things? Jesus repeatedly made the point that being a Jew didn’t make you saved. Being good made you saved. Roman soldiers, women, heathen foreigners – all these people that his audience viewed as lesser were better than Jews who mouthed the words but didn’t walk the walk.
Jebediah, RBG
@Villago Delenda Est:
And for anyone who doesn’t see it, don’t worry – they are happy to continue providing examples. Over, and over, and over…
dslak
There’s also a purity aspect of the Good Samaritan story as it concerns the priest and the Levite. If the man were dead rather than injured, the priest or Levite would become unclean by coming into contact with him. They would rather leave a possibly injured man to die than risk coming into contact with one who was dead. This also ties in pretty nicely to Tim’s point: The priest and Levite cared more about maintaining their sense of being “pure” than taking a risk to help someone else.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck:
So there it is. Works over faith.
Fundigelical heads would explode if they weren’t empty to begin with. Implode, perhaps…
boatboy_srq
@Bobby Thomson: Samaritans weren’t an outgroup in Roman-occupied Judea: Samaria and Judea were cultural enemies, had warred only recently prior to Roman occupation, and denounced each other regularly in their respective places of worship, knowledge and policy. Less Fortunate/Unfortunate and more Croatia/Serbia. And he was also the only person to come to the traveler’s aid. The Otherness only highlights the “this is what everyone ought to do” part of the message. The modern Xtian equivalent would be O’Keefe or Perkins righteously shooting that Arab American for rescuing Malkin, then taking Malking to task for being insufficiently Righteous (Xtian) or self-sufficient (libtard) to get taken advantage of that way in the first place.
Frankensteinbeck
@dslak:
That kinda makes it worse. Purity is not that big a deal. Mostly you weren’t supposed to do religious things until you could be declared clean again. By those same religious standards, it was a truly hypocritical Jew (much like the Xtianists today!) who ignored the central virtues of charity and helping other Jews using a lesser rule like that as an excuse.
sparrow
@askew: Thank you so much! I just signed up to help with basic needs, transportation, and tutoring (I’m in Baltimore).
Ripley
That would be the breeze wafting down from La Jolla. And good luck finding a Samaritan there – good, bad, or otherwise.
AliceBlue
@askew:
I’m afraid things aren’t looking good for Michelle Nunn in Georgia. The latest SurveyUSA poll has her down 50-41.
Bobby Thomson
@boatboy_srq:
I didn’t say Samaritans were economically disadvantaged. The one in the parable isn’t. But I don’t see how a cultural enemy isn’t a member of an outgroup.
dslak
@Frankensteinbeck: Purity doesn’t seem like a big deal to us, but a sudden interruption in people’s daily lives and their ability to interact with God would probably come with a social cost “Look at how Shmuel pollutes himself, on the off-chance he might help some deluded Samaritan!”
The Jewish prophetic tradition, as well as Jesus, condemn this privileging of personal purity over helping the needy. But loss of purity is not nothing. It only seems so to us moderns, who have an awareness of germ theory to explain how diseases spread, as well as a disenchanted view of the world that doesn’t give much credence to such ideas determining how we ought to behave.
askew
@sparrow:
Awesome news!!! Good for you for doing something. I’ve donating money monthly, but I need to be doing more.
askew
@AliceBlue:
August is always a shitty month for Dems in polling. We must all be off having fun and not answering our phones or something. I think once the fall rolls around and we start seeing serious GOTV efforts along with debates those #s will move. It will be an uphill fight no doubt, but we might just pull it off.
StringOnAStick
Mean people suck.
My neighbors and I are trying to get petitions signed to make the city do a traffic calming project for a road that runs through our ‘hood on its way to a more affluent ‘hood. This is what city ordinance requires, and 60% of those in the impacted area must agree. The road in question is as wide as a federal highway and yet it is in the middle of a residential ‘hood and has school bus stops on it. The speed limit is 25mph, but the traffic study they did in May says 85% of people drive 45mph, and the peak speed measured was 68mph. There are a lot of families with young kids here, and obviously people doing nearly double the speed limit on a residential street is a safety issue.
We’re getting 80 to 90% agreement/signatures from those of us in the “driven-through” neighborhood, and tons of pushback from those who just speed through here to get home. My neighbor was out collecting signatures with her 5 year old and 2 year old in tow. One of the people in the more affluent ‘hood told her no, he wouldn’t sign because “we don’t have any children, so why should we suffer”. Like I said, mean people suck, and so do selfish assholes like this guy, saying something like that to a young mom and her two young kids. I checked the address; he always has campaign yard signs for rethugs. Surprised?
Frankensteinbeck
@Villago Delenda Est:
The gospels are one long anti-hypocrisy rant. If god is great, he can heal people far away. If he’s merciful, he won’t deny salvation to a foreign woman who asks for it. Praying where people can praise you for it is pride, not faith. Don’t obsess over rules and miss the message. And most of all, if charity is TRULY the primary virtue, then being an observant Jew ain’t half as important as being kind.
aimai
@dslak: Yes. Thank you for pointing this out. Purity and Pollution had a different meaning at that time (and still in cultures where they are important) and loss of purity for a priest could mean terrible harm, real world harm, to him and his family and community. Impurity for some people could mean disaster for the entire community—-g-d caused disaster. Jesus preached a very different visio of the material and the spiritual but that was not a very common understanding of the issue.
Jebediah, RBG
@StringOnAStick:
Yeah, cuz ensuring children’s safety is such “suffering.” What an asshole.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I love fish, live in SD, and didn’t know about this guy. Regardless of his actions, I’d go anyway – he has good product. That he’s pissing off our local Nazis is just icing on the cake.
Also: nonstop lightning since 3am. WTF?
NonyNony
@Frankensteinbeck:
The thing about the Gospels is that you can read almost any message you want to into them. If you go in expecting to read a hellfire condemnation of people who aren’t Christians, you can find it (mostly in John, though you can find it in all of them). If you go in expecting to find social justice exhortations, you can find it (mostly in the Synoptics, but it’s in all of them). If you go in expecting to find a call to arms for Holy War you can find that too (holy crap – try reading the Gospels as if you were a Radical Dominionist and there are calls to arms through the whole thing – and that’s just the Gospels, Paul’s letters and Revelations are worse). The Gospels are basically a Rorschach test for the person reading them – whatever you want to justify can be justified in the Gospels if you work at it.
It’s a bit harder to read anything you want to into Paul’s letters, but it can be done as well. It’s how Calvin could arrive at his idea of an evil, hateful spiteful God that will condemn most of the world to hellfire while the Catholic Church had been preaching universal salvation through repentance and faith for centuries. Both based on the same passages in the same sets of writings.
Villago Delenda Est
@Frankensteinbeck: You’d never know that from listening to Joel Osteen, or Billy Graham, or Rick Warren, or (fill in the name of any of hundreds of televangelizing grifters here).
shelley
@Villago Delenda Est:
Why wait? Why not do it now? Oh, right…optics
RSA
@Bobby Thomson:
FTFY.
Villago Delenda Est
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Thor is upset at Sif over a substandard hummer, I’d guess.
JustRuss
I think the hatred has little to do with shame, so much as hatred of someone who’s welcoming 4 more brown people to the land of the free-as-long-as-you’re-white. I grew up in California, and there’s plenty of hatred of Mexicans, and by Mexicans I mean people whose family has lived there longer than it’s been part of the United States. If these folks had their way, all immigrants would be illegal, because there would be no legal way to immigrate, at least from south of the border.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Villago Delenda Est: “Beware of the false teachers–men who come to you in sheep’s fleeces, but beneath that disguise they are ravenous wolves.”
Mnemosyne
@StringOnAStick:
I think I asked this too late in the thread where you brought this up before — is there any way you guys could install some of those temporary speed bumps as a stopgap measure, or would that get you in trouble with the city? Though, given what assholes the neighbors seem to be, it would probably only piss them off more.
Another idea: is someone friendly enough with the police department and/or city hall to get a motorcycle cop to sit there during commuting hours and hand out tickets? If nothing else, sounds like a guaranteed source of revenue for the city. :-)
Elizabelle
@Villago Delenda Est:
All the more reason for Allison Lundergan Grimes to take McConnell out in the Kentucky Senate race.
Go Allison! Go Blue, Kentucky!
Prometheus Shrugged
@Ripley:
Actually, you’d be surprised. The university presence has made La Jolla much more liberal and tolerant than would otherwise be the case for such a wealthy community (I live in La Jolla, and my entire neighborhood of 200+ houses is solid blue.) The Mittens and Queen Ann types are here too, for sure, but they represent a minority.
Mark Lane makes regular appearances at Farmer’s Markets around San Diego. I’ve bought oysters from him before. He’s always seemed like a good guy, and now this story reinforces that impression. Definitely worth supporting.
Chris
@boatboy_srq:
Croatia/Serbia? Maybe even Israel/Palestine.
boatboy_srq
@Bobby Thomson: Peer relationship, not dominant/suppressed.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: Israel/Palestine doesn’t work quite so well, because the Palestinians are working from a disadvantage on their home turf. Serb/Croat works, as does Hatfield/McCoy.
scav
suffering for the Affluent. Any reputable Cost-Benefit analysis <sniff> would reveal that their time is worth so very very much, even that of the non-salaried wives, that the gain due to reduced commute time is demonstrably more valuable than the entire potential lifetime earning stream of the other persons child they occasionally take out in their busy valuable day. I mean!, and that’s before the emotional agony of not having the foot on the accelerator and the loss of best-use of the engineering and acceleration of their high-end vehicle. The only possibly comparable suffering and oppression is that endured by Christian CEO’s unable to dictate their religious beliefs and practices unto those they gift with employment.
pluege
nope, not it. People get pissed about the issues because they individually feel helpless to do anything, and leadership does not (or cannot) exist anywhere in modern American society. The guilty part is secondary, a symptom of helplessness as in guilty because they’re not doing anything about something they know needs doing. But the pisses off part first stems from the helplessness.
chrome agnomen
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? SMFH
other than possessing shriveled, shrunken, desiccated objects in their chests where formerly a heart was located.
what kind of a life is that to live? i honestly think one would be better off to kill oneself than go through existence in that state.
karen
@Lawrence:
Just because we have “laws” that doesn’t mean that the law will be enforced. More and more of the cops are either ex-military or Oath Keepers and the only “laws” that are enforced are the “laws” they self-create. Think about it and what you’ve seen and tell me I’m wrong. I want to be wrong and I hope I am. But it’s reaching the point where only right wing laws, seem to exist.
Like in Ferguson. If G-d Forbid PBO went there and some Alex Jones acolyte shot him or even worse, killed him, let’s see how slow the cops charge the shooter with murder. If ever.
Davis X. Machina
@AliceBlue: This was never not a longshot seat.
Mnemosyne
@karen:
Fortunately, unlike in 1963, assassinating a president is now a federal crime (law was passed in 1965), so it wouldn’t be up to local police to do anything but get the fuck out of the way of the FBI.
karen
What I don’t get is that this man isn’t adopting the refugees permanently. I guess that we’ve reached the point in this country where if they saw a child that crossed the border, they’d gleefully kill them and mount the child’s head in their den.
boatboy_srq
@chrome agnomen: On the one hand, it’s the FundiEvangelist Xtian set: hearts are surgically removed immediately following baptism (knd of the Fundie version of circumcision). On the other, it’s the Mammon-worshipping Free-Marketers: heart-shriveling is part of their base curriculum.
Tim F.
@karen: He is also hosting their mother. It could get awkward.
RaflW
I’m generally not an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy, but at least on facebook, the shitheels who post stuff as they did on Mr. Lane’s business page should be publicly shamed, by name, often.
That they get away with this shit is why they do that shit. Anonymous internet trolls are an issue. Hateful facebookers shouldn’t be.
karen
@Tim F.:
I didn’t mean that he would adopt the children. I meant “adopt” like taking them under his wing and in his house forever.
Sorry for the confusion.
RaflW
@karen:
Decades of utterly dehumanizing hate radio does seem to destroy the hearts of a lot of people. Rush, Ingraham, Savage et all have debased vast swathes of America.
They are destroyers of souls, not conservatives in any normal sense of that word.
EthylEster
@aimai: I recently viewed a Teaching Company video on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was amazed at how obsessed they were with Purity. It was news to me that the people at Qumran considered it polluting to defecate with the walls of Jerusalem and within the Qumran settlement.
Seanly
What sort of reprehensible troglodytes would attack such a generous act of charity?
Villago Delenda Est
@Seanly: The Tea Party.
debbie
@elmo:
I just shared on my page. I don’t mind people making objections, but the death threats are just too much.
Caphilldcne
Rarely comment here (or anywhere ) but the US Conference on AIDS will be in San Diego in October. I will plan to go here and bring people with me. Only recently (2010) did the US stop barring HIV-positive people from entering the country. Or allow green cards for same sex weddings. We should continue to offer refuge and help to those in need.