Opinion | An America Commensurate to the Capacity for Wonder

Journalists, so reviled, are human, subsuming emotion, or harnessing it, in the quest for lucidity. “It is generally overlooked,” Max Weber wrote, “that a journalist’s actual responsibility is far greater than the scholar’s.” Certainly, this actual responsibility, even before the unthinkable, is overlooked in this White House.

My life changed in small ways and large, as did all Americans’. The oxygen was sucked out of a new century’s élan. Something crimped took its place. Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, tells me he was practicing law in California when the attack happened. That day he decided he wanted to go into public service. He sent an application to the F.B.I. and soon found his way to a job at what was then the United States Customs Service. “This is why I was called to serve,” he says.

McAleenan is a candid, no-nonsense, energetic guy who is trying, I believe, to bring some order at the southern border consistent with America’s spirit as a nation of immigrants and its foundation as a nation of laws. Least-bad solutions are out of favor in a country of howling politicized factions, but there is no other kind for the mess at the border. The antidote to the brutality and xenophobia that have stained America’s conscience is not throwing America’s doors wide open.

In the five months since his appointment, McAleenan has traveled several times to Central America, where the root of the problem lies. Apprehensions at the southwest border have fallen steeply since May. Children are no longer being ripped from their parents. McAleenan is a welcome restraint on the worst anti-immigrant instincts of the Trump Administration.

Of course, he’s still “acting.” Every Homeland Security business card I received from the secretary’s aides had the word “acting” on it. The president likes to instill fear, change course. Acting is Trump’s thing.

There is the man, and then there is the country. Myriad people still come to the United States, seeking work, dignity, possibility, education and the protection of the law. Something endures that is commensurate to their “capacity for wonder.” To underestimate that America, even if the country is unhealed, would be a mistake.

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