When debate dissolves into hate

IT comes as no surprise that death threats and hate mail have accompanied the current debate over immigration. It’s the good-old American way.

Both L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante have been recipients of the “I’m-gonna-getcha” threats and the “dirty-Mexican” mail after supporting the rights of immigrants to be treated as human beings.

This was revealed by none other than Gov. pro tem Arnold Schwarzenegger, who found it generally despicable, terrible, awful and not at all Californian. This is the same guv, by the way, who not long ago was praising armed civilian patrols at the border. Instead of rallying the vigilantes, he should have urged them to go home, before it all escalated to threats of murdering someone because of his beliefs.

Hatred is an easy emotion to come by, especially if one feels somehow threatened by the existence of a hatee. Hatred is free, easy and possibly even therapeutic. In this case, of course, it’s people with brown skin and a funny way of speaking who are the targets of those whose capacity for compassion is limited by the antipathy that fills them.

The anti-immigrants will tell you loudly and angrily that it’s not the people they object to but their illegal entry into the U.S. And then they will go on to tell you, as they have told me, that “those people” are destroying our educational system, clogging our hospitals, overtaxing our social systems and littering our beaches.

If that isn’t enough to get a real American madder than hell, how about all the babies Latinas are having! Litters of them! Pretty soon there’ll be no place in the state for a white guy with an SUV!

And so they sit down with stubby pencils and lined paper and write notes that say “watch your back, spic,” as they have written to me, and “I know where your children go to school, beaner,” as they have also written to me.

I began receiving death threats and hate mail from the beginning of my newspaper career in the Bay Area, mostly because my name is Martinez and because I was more than often bylined on the front page. When I was given a column in the 1960s at the Oakland Tribune and began taking on the racists and the war-lovers, the threats and the hate mail increased exponentially.

One evening after midnight, a brick shattered a large, plate-glass window in our home, exploding like a bomb, shattering glass throughout the living room and terrifying my wife and two daughters. Subsequent mail said it was just the beginning. I borrowed a friend’s .38-caliber pistol and waited, but there was never a follow-up.

In another instance, a serial hate-mailer, whose favorite form of communication was to write about the blood (mine) that he planned to spill, correctly identified the school my two girls attended. Threats aimed at me, I could take. Aimed at my children, I would not tolerate. He signed his letters “Joe Blow” and they were always mailed from the upscale East Bay community of Lafayette.

Receiving no help from police or postal authorities, I decided that a guy who wrote a lot of hate mail probably also vented in letters to the editor. Hatred requires a diversity of outlets. I began searching through the letters the Tribune received, looking for ones written with a typewriter that had a broken key. After a while, I found it -- including the real name and address of the sender. I went looking for him.

As it turned out, the guy who was so full of hatred that he couldn’t contain it was a frail, frightened little man in his late 80s. He cried when confronted and said it didn’t mean anything, that he was sorry and would stop doing it.

He was an old man who lived alone and existed on the energy of his rage. I neither warned nor lectured him, but tossed his threatening letter on a table and left. He was, at least, good to his word. I never heard from him again.

There have been others, up north and in L.A., with contents so vile that they have challenged the lowest levels of human decency. Once or twice, threats of violence have been implied, but mostly the letters, phone calls or e-mails contain only litanies of hatred, laced with obscenities, and not warnings of direct action. I greet them now with a long sigh.

I’m not alone in receiving these reminders of the misanthropes among us. As we know now, Villaraigosa and Bustamante, both prominent Latinos, have received them. And if you went around asking, you’d find that various lawyers, teachers, judges, cops, actors, preachers, merchants and the guy next door have gotten them too.

We’re a nation that unites only in peril. The rest of the time, it’s every man for himself. There’s a song in the musical “South Pacific” that says you’ve got to be taught to hate. It appears that in generations of American tutelage, we’ve taught our children well.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.