FOREST GROVE, Ore. - All across America, in little towns like this one, Donald Trump is mainstreaming hate.
This community of Forest Grove, near the farm where I grew up in western Oregon, has historically been a charming, friendly and welcoming community. But in the middle of a physics class at the high school one day this spring, a group of white students suddenly began jeering at their Latino classmates and chanting: "Build a wall! Build a wall!"
"They openly express their dislike of my race," Briana Larios, a 15-year-old Mexican-American honor roll student who hopes to go to Harvard, said of some of her white classmates. "People now feel that it is OK to say things that they might not have said a year ago," she said. "Trump played a big role."
Among any nation's most precious possessions is its social fabric, and that is what Donald Trump is rending with incendiary talk about roughing up protesters and about gun owners solving the problem of Hillary Clinton making judicial nominations.
Trump only mildly distanced himself when an adviser suggested that Clinton should be executed by firing squad for treason, and his rallies have become toxic brews of hatred.
We need not be apocalyptic about it. This is not Kristallnacht. But Trump's harsh rhetoric tears away the veneer of civility and betrays our national motto of "e pluribus unum." He has unleashed a beast and fed its hunger, and long after this campaign is over, we will be struggling to corral it again.
The upshot is that this election year, we're divided not only by political party and ideology, but also by identity. So the weave of our national fabric unravels. And while our eyes have mostly been on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the nation's history is being written not just in the capital and grand cities, but also in small towns and etched in the lives of ordinary people.
I wrote a column recently exploring whether Trump is a racist, and a result was anti-Semitic vitriol from Trump followers, one of whom suggested I should be sent to the ovens for writing "a typical Jewish hit piece."
In fact, I'm Armenian and Christian, not Jewish, but the responses underscored that the Trump campaign is enveloped by a cloud of racial, ethnic and religious animosity - much of it poorly informed.
I hope Trump and his aides will soon come to recognize that words have consequences that go far beyond politics, consequences that cannot be undone.
It's perhaps inevitable that some overzealous supporters will periodically go too far, but Trump need not incite them.
So far, Trump has arguably benefited from his fondness for over-the-top rhetoric. He gets attention and television time and is always at the center of his own hurricane. But in November, after the ballots have been counted, we will still have a country to share, and I fear it may be a harsher and more fragile society because of Trump.
Inflammatory talk isn't entertaining, but dangerous.
Yet if bigotry has been amplified by his candidacy, let's remember that there are still deep reservoirs of social capital - including in conservative neighborhoods - that have proved impervious to Trump's insinuations.
In Georgia, an India-born Muslim named Malik Waliyani bought a gas station and convenience store a few months ago and was horrified when it was recently burglarized and damaged. He struggled to keep it going. But then the nearby Smoke Rise Baptist Church heard what had happened.
"Let's shower our neighbor with love," Chris George, the pastor, told his congregation at the end of his sermon, and more than 200 members drove over to assist, mostly by making purchases. One man drove his car around until the gas tank was empty, so he could buy more gas.
This is a wrenching, divisive, polarizing time in America, and we have a major party nominee who is sowing hatred and perhaps violence. Let's not succumb. Good people, like the members of Smoke Rise Baptist, are reweaving our nation's social fabric even as it is being torn.
The New York Times