Guest Article By David McReynolds - What Will History Have To Say Of Us?

The author of this piece is David McReynolds, an old friend and partner in crime, literally. David is a  long time socialist and pacifist, retired, living in Lower Manhattan. Here are his thoughts on the separation of families at our borders.

This week Donald Trump staged a show in which his racism was masked by the use of the tragedy of others.

While parents at the border were frantic about where their children were, Trump brought together a handful of Americans whose sons and daughters had been killed by aliens.

The tragedy of those deaths was real, the grief was a fact, not a political position. It would not matter whether the deaths had been by accident or intent, or whether the agents responsible were citizens or aliens. Let nothing I write here be taken to minimize the death of loved ones.

But Trump had something else in mind. Trump, the talented but empty man, unloved by his father, not terribly bright, clearly a bit mad, and racist to his core, was using the grief of those on stage as if they compensated for the horror Trump had imposed on the immigrant community.

In the face of parents whose children had been taken away from them by the thousands, and are now scattered in holding centers across the nation, Trump wanted us to see those alien, human, frightened men and women, hoping for safety for their children, not as our brothers and sisters, but as killers, rapists, and the agents who had brought grief to the handful Trump had gathered for his TV show.

What is stunning to me is not that Trump would stage this show, not that he tore the children at the borders from their parents - there is, to Trump, no moral center, no trace of any awareness of right or wrong. No, what is alarming is that there is a willing audience for Trump, that the racism in our nation, at times so masked we even elected Obama as President, can be brought to the surface, cultivated like a lethal virus, turned into a political force.

The issue is not Trump. He learned the social graces well enough to move freely among the very rich, to have the Clintons at his wedding, to buy the silence of those he abused - great money has great power. No, the issue is us, the public, and the question is why Trump has any following at all.

What has happened to the evangelical community that it supports him? That a man would put on a stage show of those who have suffered, to divert the public from the issue of those now suffering, suggests the sickness of the man. But what of us? Is there any grief greater than that of a mother or father whose child has been lost "In the system", who cannot be reached, touched, embraced?

We are entitled not to agree on some single "correct position" on immigration, but we are not entitled to use children as bargaining chips for political ends. Trump is not Hitler - he lacks the complexity of Hitler. But we risk being the German people. The evangelical church needs, with great urgency, to read the gospels on which it is based. To remember the words of Jesus on the value of children. Jesus saw them as of intrinsic value. Trump sees them only as coins in a political game.

He has gone too far, at last. He has always allowed himself a tiny wiggle room. When he launched his campaign by attacking Mexicans as killers and rapists he added "and some I'm sure are good people", so his followers would not see the depth of his racism. But now that slight qualification is gone. He has not only used the children as political coins, but in his stage show of those who suffered from attacks by aliens, he has used human grief for entirely political ends.

History may bury Trump. But what will it have to say of us? Of those in the GOP whose fear of losing a primary has forced their silence? Rarely has raw evil been so clearly in view.