A border agent made a cruel quip about the children. It could have been any of us.

"Bueno, tenemos una orquesta,” says the border patrol agent over the din of the children who’ve been separated from their parents and are wailing all around him. “We’ve got an orchestra.”

This audio clip, released last Monday by ProPublica, galvanized opposition to the Trump administration’s family separation policy. The clip had that effect because while it’s one thing to read a cold description of a policy, it’s another to hear its sobbing child victims. And it’s yet another to listen to a seemingly callous government agent make light of the suffering around him.

The “orchestra” quip seemed to summarize everything that was cruel and heartless about the government’s policy. What an unconscionable thing for this family-busting jailer to say! Who are these monstrous people, laughing amidst the harm they’re causing?

Any student of history will tell you: they are you and me.

I am writing a book about the government lawyers who helped to run the Japanese-American concentration camps of World War II. These men were the progressives of their day – men of the New Deal. They worked for the agency responsible for confining the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans that racist Army officials had kicked off the West Coast.

These lawyers were, by and large, decent men who thought the camps they were running were unnecessary and quite possibly illegal. They understood themselves to be helping a persecuted and beleaguered minority. Very often that was true.

And yet in their letters to each other they were capable of shocking callousness. In one 1943 letter, the lawyer at the Gila River concentration camp in Arizona described for his colleagues at the other camps a “very amusing adultery case” that had taken place – amusing because, in the lawyer’s words, “the adulterous act was witnessed by a large crowd which had gathered around the barracks and was receiving detailed accounts of the proceedings from eyewitnesses who were peering in through a window from a ladder.”

We know from his writings that this man was sensitive to the terrible loss of privacy the inmates were enduring. And yet at times he made it the stuff of humor.

These were not the words of a monstrous perpetrator. They were the words of a decent man trying to adapt in an indecent system.

I hear the same thing in the “orchestra” quip of the border patrol agent. I hear a law enforcement officer who took the important job of protecting our borders and now finds himself in a pen of traumatized innocent children, charged with the impossible task of consoling them.

I hear a man who is trying to help and is not sure how he got to the absurd place he finds himself.

If there is something terrible in the audio clip, something from which we recoil, it’s not the quip. It’s the realization that this is how evil works. Bad leaders make bad plans and then rely on ordinary, decent men and women to show up at work every day and bring them into being. We adjust to them. We normalize them. We rationalize them. We blow off a little steam with grim humor.

That is the horror of the “orchestra” quip. It could be any of us talking.

This story was originally published June 22, 2018 at 8:08 AM with the headline "A border agent made a cruel quip about the children. It could have been any of us.."