Last night, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and entourage were booted from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia by a co-owner who just couldn’t bring himself to serve a servant of the Trump Administration and boy was she mad about it and boy are the usual suspects, members of the namby-pamby D.C. press commentariat concerned about civility, too.  This on the heels of Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Head Kirstjen Nielsen being heckled by fellow diners while separately trying to dine out on high end Mexican food. It’s almost hard to go out in public if you support kidnapping the children of desperate asylum seekers.

Except that it’s not.  Though majorities object to what is going on at the border, a significant portion of the country, and a more significant portion of our political leadership actually supports treating all border crossers as criminal and prosecuting every case as a deterrent for others.  If it means children are separated from their parents and maybe fostered thousands of miles away in an alien culture, so be it.  Heck, their only proposed solution, so far, is to lock the children in cages with their parents. They simply do not see this as a problem.

Just like, when a Colorado baker refused to make a cake for a gay wedding, Republican rank and file and leadership did not see that as a problem.  When they and theirs get kicked and heckled out of restaurants, it’s a problem.  When other people are denied services, it’s freedom of speech.

The first thing I felt when I heard the cries of children at the border released by Pro Publica was the revolting notion that a government that would do this to children would do anything to anybody and I thought of my own child being taken away from me. But it seems a good number of people did not leap to any sort of empathy and thought, rather, “Well, this would never happen to me and mine.” They may well be right about that. They probably are. But you make cold policy that way.

It was the same with Black Lives Matter.  Were police massacring, abusing and harassing young white men in middle class and upper class neighborhoods, things would have changed in a hurry.  If New York’s police had exercised stop and frisk authority on white clubgoers likely holding ecstasy and cocaine in their pockets and purses, things would have stopped.  Instead, the policy ground on for ages while the people with the political clout to do anything about it shrugged that it wasn’t their problem. Heck, some saw it not only as not happening to them but as happening to others for their benefit.

I think it’s a dangerous game we’re playing. The government, at all levels, will happily follow orders separating families, penning people into cages, using lethal force, whatever. Once the orders are given, the system simply carries them out. There’s not even introspection, much less resistance.  The public’s willingness to tolerate and even celebrate such things, so long as some out group is the main target, explains a good deal about why this isn’t being stopped.