I sat next to a pleasant elder gentleman on the plane yesterday and, during our conversation, I discovered he fervently believes all illegal immigrants coming to our borders are thieves, rapists, and gang members...because the @GOP and Administration told him so.

The man beside me spoke repeatedly of "they" and "them", venomously deriding black, brown, and other PoC as a virus that required swift eradication. I was shocked, but I was seated next to him for 3 hours.
I knew an argument would resolve nothing.

I sought to learn more about him, and soon discovered he was a Jewish Vietnam vet whose parents were murdered at #Auschwitz. I tried to lay before him the parallel of otherwise honorable Germans accepting Nazi propaganda about Jews and the need to wall/fence them off. No success.

He shared with me his hatred for the Vietnamese people, borne of his years In Country. He spoke of them with particular and perhaps somewhat understandable (albeit unreasonable) venom.
Then he introduced me to his Vietnamese wife sitting in the third seat of our row.

I saw then, more than ever before, that the rationale of the conservative xenophobe cannot be course corrected:
"When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards" -(Grace Slick)

The man I sat next to will likely never read this story from @NPR, or see these images. They are outside his reality, which greatly saddens me buff.ly/2YOzQ6D
Education with integrity foments knowledge and enlightenment.