Early each morning I submerge myself in African news. Until this year I struggled with my arrogance, checking possible pretensions about honesty and fairness that Africans were presumed lacking. That’s flipped. I fear the morning, now:

“Nothing short of torture,” one of South Africa’s most respected publications said today, quoting Amnesty International’s characterization of what is happening on our southern border.

Every morning in the African press – presumably throughout the world – there are dozens, hundreds of accounts, of Americans faltering, slipped, turning evil. This is no cold war propaganda. It’s just the truth, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it.

Today throughout the world simple, sane, respectable people are looking at the way Americans treat foreign refugee children and cringing.

“ President Trump’s border security policy has sparked tears … and outrage” and “It took on particular resonance as America celebrated Father’s Day,” South Africa’s The Citizen News published today.

Summarizing the travesty, Nairobi’s Daily Nation today claimed, “Children separated from parents at US border sob, wail desperately” and started the article with three salient points:

“Border Patrol agent can be heard joking about the wailing children.”

“The children were mostly from … violence-plagued Central American countries.” They are refugees. They aren’t gang members or rapists or killers. They are fleeing violence.

The “action has sparked outrage at home — and around the world.”

I know better than most that criticism of America is often spurious. I know when our critics are motivated by jealousy. And I’m so horribly confused now that so many Americans think this is what is happening, now.

I long ago absolved Donald Trump of responsibility. He’s too close to being certifiably insane. He’s at least so insecure that he is himself too childlike to be made culpable for what’s happening to our country.

What’s happening to our country is a cultural wave phenomenon, mass deceit, and that’s been troubling enough.

But now that the effects of that deceit have moved beyond destruction of the environment, suppression of the middle class, oppression of gender and ethnic minorities, and basic neglect of the needy… to harming children, I’m stymied.

The South Africans are correct. It’s torture, and I want to know what you’re doing to stop it.