Why do we call it terror when the Manchester, England, perpetrator is named Abedi, but not when a man named Christian shouts racial slurs at a Portland, Ore., teenager and her Muslim friend and then stabs three men who ask him to stop?
Why do we call it terror when men with names like Redouane and Zaghba ram a van into walkers on the London Bridge but not when a veteran named Neumann guns down five of his former coworkers in an Orlando awning shop.?
Why do we make a big deal of eight deaths in that London van and knife attack, but not seem aware of the 12 people killed by gunfire in Chattanooga since Jan. 1? Gang shootings and domestic violence are not terror?
And why can we not depend on our president to model best behavior on these touchy questions, rather than the bully behavior that reinforces and even encourages mockery, bigotry and violence?
Soon after news of the London attacks last weekend, Donald Trump's Twitter finger got itchy.
Did he offer condolences to the victims? Did he go on the airwaves to assure Britons that America remains their ally? No. He tweeted stuff like this: We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!
Even after a night's sleep he kept it up: "We must stop being politically correct " Then with Twitter, he verbally attacked the mayor of London (his name is Sadiq Khan) by taking out of context a partial quote from a statement by mayor. Trump tweeted: "At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is "no reason to be alarmed!"
What Khan - London's first ethnic minority mayor and the first Muslim to become the mayor of a major Western capital - actually said was "Londoners will see an increased police presence today and over the course of the next few days. There's no reason to be alarmed. One of the things the police and all of us need to do is ensure that we're as safe as we possibly can be."
Khan was clearly referring not to the threat from terrorists but to the increased police presence when he used the words "no reason to be alarmed."
This is not intended so much to rail on Trump, however, as it is to question why we as a society have become so numb to hate and bigotry. So accepting of bullying violence.
Buzzfeed News wrote last week of 50 incidents, across 26 states, in which a K-12 student or students invoked Trump's name or message as they taunted or bullied classmates during the school year since the election.
Educators told Buzzfeed they thought it wasn't so much an emulation of Trump as mentor, but of what they see and hear on television daily, perhaps echoed in their homes. And what's wrong with it, they (and sometimes their parents) questioned. After all, if the president can say it, why can't they?
Here are some examples from the article:
"In the parking lot of a high school in Shakopee, Minn., boys in Donald Trump shirts gathered around a black teenage girl and sang a portion of 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' replacing the closing line with 'and the home of the slaves.' On a playground at an elementary school in Albuquerque, N.M., third-graders surrounded a boy and chanted 'Trump! Trump! Trump!'
"On a school bus in San Antonio, a white eighth-grader said to a Filipino classmate, 'You are going to be deported.' In a classroom in Brea, Calif., a white eighth-grader told a black classmate, 'Now that Trump won, you're going to have to go back to Africa, where you belong.' In the hallway of a high school in San Mateo County, Calif., a white student told two biracial girls to "go back home to whatever country you're from." In Louisville, a third-grade boy chased a Latina girl around the classroom shouting "Build the wall!" In a stadium parking lot in Jacksonville, Fla., after a high school football game, white students chanted at black students from the opposing school: 'Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump!'"
It seems we're all struggling to navigate a time and climate where misogyny, religious intolerance, name-calling and racial exclusion have become part of mainstream political speech.
And we cannot just blame it on Trump. After all, 62.9 million Americans voted for him knowing exactly what he was saying - and apparently liked it.
If the school yards and hallways are any indication, things will only get worse. Buzzfeed notes that today's high schoolers will be eligible to vote in 2020 and our fifth-graders will be able to vote in 2024.
"Kumbaya" and the need for unity hasn't changed, but America has.
We have to turn this around.
No matter what our partisan stripes may be, no matter what our ethnic background, no matter where we go to church, allowing ourselves and our children to blindly embrace the pain and consequence of hatefulness will not make America great again.