Last week Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton to be president of the United States, making the event with a series of passionate speeches condemning the scapegoating, race bating, and hate-mongering of her Republican opponent.
On Friday morning, I took my teenage daughter and a friend to the Genocide Memorial in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. The timing of our visit to the museum and Clinton's speech was coincidental. The nausea that overcame me as we wended our way down the museum's dimmed corridors was not: photograph after photograph, testimony after testimony, showcases full of human remains -- all testifying to the power that hate speech can have on previously stable communities, and to how ignoring or downplaying the potential effect of such speech can be cataclysmic.
Make no mistake. The United States in 2016 is not pre-genocide Rwanda. The social and economic frustration roiling white, male, post-industrial America is categorically different from the political and ethnic tension that brought Rwanda to the bursting point in the early 1990s. Still, the ease with which demagogues like Trump and Hutu propagandists can turn citizen against citizen, neighbor against neighbor, and even husbands against wives is constantly unsurprising.
Despite being sickened by what I was seeing, I did my best to keep an eye on the girls. They had held up pretty well from the look of it. Until we reached the Children's Room at the end of the tour. Here the contrast between innocence and evil became absolute. Life-sized photographs of young victims (one, three, five, twelve years old) covered the walls. Over each photograph hung a placard with the child's first name. Below was a description of the child's best friend, favorite food and activities, and how they were killed.
The idea that a single one of these kids could somehow be guilty of anything -- and worthy of being blamed, denounced, dehumanized and slaughtered (the violence in Rwanda was cruel beyond the power of words) -- is unfathomable and literally heartbreaking. And so my daughter broke down. Hers was the only reasonable response, and of course she was hardly alone.
The Children's Room represents an extreme version of what happens when whole categories of people are said to be less valuable than other people. A society need not go this far to go too far. The polarization that sometimes leads to genocide can do plenty of damage along the way, promoting not only political gridlock and social disintegration, but violence and intimidation, as we see throughout the United States today.
History does not repeat itself, and historical analogies have their limit. But Donald Trump is hardly the first to invite the persecution of whole categories of people (including innocent children) by talk of making the country great again. The Hutu genocidaires wanted to make Rwanda great again. Hitler wanted to restore Germany to greatness. Mussolini imagined a great Italy, Franco a great Spain, and so on. Some of them nearly succeeded, their relative "achievement" evidence not of their prowess as leaders, as Donald Trump might suggest, but of something rotten at the core of their humanity -- and of our propensity to ignore the evil that human beings are capable of until it's too late.
What are Americans waiting for? Our Rwandan friends want to know.