+
upworthy
Heroes

After harassing people celebrating Pride their boat burst into flames. Guess who saved them?

After harassing people celebrating Pride their boat burst into flames. Guess who saved them?

Harassing people is gross, no matter who they are. Harassing people who are flying rainbow flags expressing support for LGBTQIA+ people is particularly gross, considering the fact they are advocating for basic civil rights and human dignity. And evidently, harassing people who are flying Pride flags while boating is egregiously gross enough to piss off Poseidon and bring the heavy hammer of karma down upon your heads.

Or maybe it's just a coincidence. Either way, this story shows that bigotry is no match for being the bigger person and that even if it ends up being a one-way street, caring about the well-being of our fellow humans is always the right thing to do.

While boating in Moses Lake, Washington last weekend, a group of boaters flying Pride flags found themselves confronted by three people in another boat. At first, they thought perhaps the boaters were coming up to express support for their rainbow flags, but it soon became apparent that wasn't the case. As the boat circled around them, one of the passengers gave the Pride-flag flyers the middle finger, and the boaters allegedly shouted gay slurs as well.

Then the bigots' boat caught fire and the people they were harassing ended up rescuing them after they jumped ship.


The story was told by Robbie on Twitter, who shared photos and video of the incident as well as issuing a statement to The Washington Post.

Robbie, a queer trans man who has withheld his name for fear of retaliation, told The Post that his family had spent the day swimming and tubing on the lake and stopped their boat around 7:00pm. A small vessel sped toward them, then circled around them at least six times, with the woman on the boat flipping them off and yelling something about "gays" and "flags."

When the boat driver noticed that Robbie's brother had started filming them, he tried to hide his face and drove away. Moments later, a loud bang came from the boat, and a plume of black smoke rose into the air.

"Holy crap!" said Robbie's brother. "They blew up!" Then he drove toward the boaters who were swimming away from their burning boat and brought them aboard.

Of course, having your boat catch on fire in the middle of a lake is a terrible thing to have happen. Some might say it's as terrible as having people going out of their way to harass you in the middle of a lake. Karma works in interesting ways.

It would be lovely to be able to share that the harassers had a wake-up call and apologized for their horrible behavior, but alas, they did not.

"The passengers were quite rude, shouting over us, ignoring my [inquiries] about their well-being when on the 911 call and smoking a Vape pen on our boat without even so much as asking if they could; several passengers of our boat have asthma," Robbie told The Post.

Police came to put out the fire, and the bigoted boaters' friends came to pick them up. When they left, they didn't even say 'Thank you" for the rescue.

But there was this little karmic detail to balance out the bad behavior.

Some people have said they just wouldn't have even helped them, while others have pointed out that boaters are required to help boaters in distress as long as it doesn't put their own vessel or passengers in danger. (Which of course begs the question—was it safe for Robbie and family to bring blatantly anti-gay bigots onto their boat?) Regardless, Robbie wrote on Twitter that the boaters were truly hurt and they felt bad for them. Helping them was simply the right thing to do, no matter how they acted before or responded after.

Robbie shared another Tweet two days later showing that they were not going to let the haters get them down.

"Happy Pride Wrath Month!"

Community

How to end hunger, according to the people who face it daily

Here’s what people facing food insecurity want you to know about solving the hunger problem in America

True

Even though America is the world’s wealthiest nation, about 1 in 6 of our neighbors turned to food banks and community programs in order to feed themselves and their families last year. Think about it: More than 9 million children faced hunger in 2021 (1 in 8 children).

In order to solve a problem, we must first understand it. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released its second annual Elevating Voices: Insights Report and turned to the experts—people experiencing hunger—to find out how this issue can be solved once and for all.

Here are the four most important things people facing hunger want you to know.

Keep ReadingShow less

A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo via Canva, @WhattheADHD/Twitter

The 'bionic reading' font is designed to help keep you focused and read faster.

Reading is a fundamental tool of learning for most people, which is why it's one of the first things kids learn in school and why nations set literacy goals.

But even those of us who are able to read fluently might sometimes struggle with the act of reading itself. Perhaps we don't read as quickly as we wish we could or maybe our minds wander as our eyes move across the words. Sometimes we get to the end of a paragraph and realize we didn't retain anything we just read.

People with focus or attention issues can struggle with reading, despite having no actual reading disabilities. It can be extremely frustrating to want to read something and have no issues with understanding the material, yet be unable to keep your mind engaged with the text long enough to get "into" what you're reading.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pets

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

Keep ReadingShow less

Only child asks her friends what it's like to grow up with siblings.

Ahhh, siblings. Sometimes they're your best friends and other times your living room turns into an MMA octagon over the remote control. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be an only child. (That's not to say you didn't dream about it when your sister stole your favorite shirt for the 30th time.)

But not everyone has siblings, so it can be equally as hard for someone who grew up as an only child to picture what it would be like to have them. Only children also likely had moments where they dreamt of having a little brother or sister, not realizing the literal torment siblings can inflict on each other.

TikTok creator Lonnie IIV recently posted a video of himself with two other friends seemingly out to lunch, when the girl in the group asked what it was like to grow up with siblings. In less than a minute she realized she lucked out being an only child because her two guy friends gave her a crash course in sibling behavior.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo: courtesy BioCarbon Engineering/WikiCommons

Technology is the single greatest contributor to climate change but it may also soon be used to offset the damage we've done to our planet since the Industrial Age began.

In September 2018, a project in Myanmar used drones to fire "seed missiles" into remote areas of the country where trees were not growing. Less than a year later, thousands of those seed missiles have sprouted into 20-inch mangrove saplings that could literally be a case study in how technology can be used to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.

Keep ReadingShow less
Health

Artists got fed up with these 'anti-homeless spikes.' So they made them a bit more ... comfy.

"Our moral compass is skewed if we think things like this are acceptable."

Photo courtesy of CC BY-ND, Immo Klink and Marco Godoy

Spikes line the concrete to prevent sleeping.


These are called "anti-homeless spikes." They're about as friendly as they sound.

As you may have guessed, they're intended to deter people who are homeless from sitting or sleeping on that concrete step. And yeah, they're pretty awful.

The spikes are a prime example of how cities design spaces to keep homeless people away.

Keep ReadingShow less