We are used to navigating unwarranted hostility from neighbors, co-workers and schoolmates, but when the person targeting you has actual power over you, it makes your life hell, psychically as well as a matter of reality.

Now just imagine how much higher the level of offense and betrayal is when one has to grapple daily with the reality that the chief executive of the country is the source of the targeting and the source of the pain.

There is no way to escape it. We are stuck. There is no way to remedy it until the next election. (I’m a firm believer that Trump should be impeached by the House of Representatives though I’m sure he won’t be removed from office by the Senate.)

We are forced to look on in horror as the power of the federal government is deployed in the service of racism: the Muslim ban, the family separation policy, children in cages, trying to build a wall, efforts to restrict even legal immigration and talk of invasions and infestations.

It is still unfathomable to me that the federal government took children away from their parents without a system for reunification, that some of those children may never see their parents again.

Even if this were only one child it would be outrageous and egregious. Unfortunately, it is more than one.

I stay stuck on this point. There is a new outrage every day, but I try to remember children. If I were one of them, away in a strange place, all alone, surrounded by strangers, and my mother or father or both were taken away, how could I possibly cope? If I were the father of a child taken away from me to who knows where, and I had no idea if I would see my child again, how could I continue to function?