There’s a new item on the menu in some American restaurants. It’s called shame.

Many people find it hard to swallow the uncomfortable fact that in the past week, as anguished debate continued in the U.S. about the Trump administration’s brutal separation of families at the Mexico border, three high officials involved in implementing or defending the initiative were heckled in restaurants or asked to leave.

What happened to them underscores how ugly a political climate Americans are living in, directly as a result of a xenophobic president who clearly aims to be divisive, and who has never met a situation he couldn’t inflame further.

There was predictable outrage from those who support the Trump administration, shocked that restaurants are now in play as a new political battleground.

But even nonsupporters were discomfited. The Washington Post, no fan of Trump’s policies, argued in an editorial that public officials should be left to eat in peace.

Should they? I’m not convinced of that. What about the idea that publicly confronting these officials was a moral risk worth taking? That every time people sit back and think this can’t get any worse, it does.

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Stephen Miller, Trump’s policy adviser said to be the architect of the administration’s new “zero tolerance” and arguably racist immigration and asylum policies, and Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security Secretary responsible for implementing them, were brutally heckled in two different Washington D.C. Mexican restaurants.

That either of them felt it would be just dandy to go get Mexican food, one of the most popular cuisines in America, while their actions directly harmed Mexicans and other Latin Americans, is so preposterously arrogant you wonder if it was a deliberate provocation.

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What happened to Kirstjen Nielsen who earlier had held a callous and tone deaf press conference denying there was a policy of separating children from their asylum seeking parents (a policy her boss Donald Trump then rescinded by executive order) was extraordinary, like a piece of theatre, both alarming and thrilling.

Captured in a video that quickly burnt up the internet, Nielsen sat last Tuesday night in a restaurant, with a male companion, as protesters screamed “shame! shame! shame!” and “if kids don’t eat in peace, you don’t eat in peace.” (The truth was that in that restaurant, no one ate in peace.)

After what seemed like an eternity, Nielsen left before finishing her meal. In Stephen Miller’s case, days later at another Mexican restaurant, protesters yelled “fascist!” at him until, as one report said, “he scurried out.”

Finally, Friday night at The Red Hen, a small “farm to table” non-Mexican restaurant in Lexington, VA., White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party were actually asked to leave by restaurant co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson because letting her stay would have made her staff uncomfortable, Wilkinson subsequently said in an interview.

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Sanders and her party left quietly before their main meal. Their cheese plates and drinks were on the house.

The press secretary later tweeted “I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so … Her actions say far more about her than about me.”

That is one transparently hypocritical tweet considering Huckabee Sanders is often viewed during live press briefings treating reporters with deep scorn, mocking them, even when one asked her “as a parent” whether she had any “empathy” for what was happening to children at the border. Apparently not.

There were positive reviews of the Red Hen’s action. “Thank you for refusing to serve a person who lies to the American people for a living,” read one online review of the Red Hen after Sanders’ ejection.

My favourite response was a tweet from L.A. writer Anthony King: “It’s encouraging that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was judged not by the colour of her skin but by the content of her character.”

That is a reference to the late Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

A restaurant deciding not to serve someone evokes painful memories of the civil rights era. How many movies have we all seen depicting disturbing scenes in diners in which Black customers are spit on, refused service, and threatened with physical harm just because they dared to claim their rightful seat at the table?

Those who ignore history are doomed to retweet it. Can we really argue that it’s now all right to harass or throw public officials out of restaurants if we don’t like their policies?

These protesters are seizing a moment that may not come again — to stand up and say directly to the powerful people who enable Trump’s policies, his ugly racist tweets, his professed desire to skirt the laws, that what the government is doing is immoral and wrong.

The most effective way to protest a government like Trump’s is of course at the ballot box. In the meantime legal challenges, mass marches and shaming moments all have their place in standing up to a bullying, bigoted and deceitful administration.

Uncomfortable as they are, I like the restaurant protests, noisy rude and brash, the cacophonous overriding of the clinking silverware, letting these officials sit there but suffer through their dinner — essentially eating their “shame shame shame.” Throwing them out altogether? Not so much.

Trump’s government is all about exclusion, about “othering” people. About denying them access. No need to do the same.

Come! You want to eat among the people whose lives you are affecting? Then listen to them roar.

Judith Timson is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @judithtimson

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