Michael's essay: What would Mr. Rogers say?

To a parent, nothing could be worse than the death of a child. To a young child, a very young child, separation from the parent must be a kind of death.

Take that child and put him or her in a wire cage or a kennel in an abandoned Walmart and you traumatize that child with images and sounds which could last a lifetime.

The isolation, the noise, the confusion, the loss of the familiar. 

Plus, the loss of physical attention because temporary caregivers have been told not to hug the children.

What has been happening in the border states of the American south in the last weeks amounts to coordinated and well-planned child abuse. More than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents in the last month alone.

Most Americans are outraged. They find it incomprehensible that the country they love and celebrate in song and story could engineer such cruelty.

Church leaders, pediatricians, some state governors and the Pope all appealed to the administration to stop its zero tolerance policy of taking children from their parents.

In the midst of the universal firestorm, U.S. President Donald Trump came to his senses and backed away from his own policy. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order to stop separating the children from their families, while keeping the zero tolerance policy.

The nagging question is about timing. Is it too late? Has the psychic damage already been done?

After reading the stories and hearing the recording of the small children screaming for their parents, a friend said to me, "There is something very wrong with the world right now." She is right; there is something wrong.

Looking for a bit of respite, I went to the movies. Won't You Be My Neighbor? is a 94-minute documentary about Fred Rogers, whose program Mr. Rogers' Neighbourhood revolutionized children's television.

At a time when children were either ignored or subjected to kids' programs — which were mindless fluff — Mr. Rogers insisted on endowing even the youngest child with the same courtesy, respect and sense of dignity we are supposed to give adults. He was, in a sense, something of a subversive.

Unlike other children's programs, he was not afraid to raise serious subjects such as death and divorce.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered two months after the show's debut in 1968, he and the puppets talked about the meaning of assassination.

He insisted scripts reflected the fact that children tend to take statements literally.

For example, when one of the actors told Henrietta Pussycat not to cry, he stopped the taping. 

"We should never tell a child it's wrong to cry," he said.

Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister and a lifelong registered Republican. His consistent message to children was that each of them is special, each is unique and each should be celebrated for who they were. He was somehow able to reach in and touch the emotional life of a child. 

A lot of his power emanated from the timbre of his voice; soft, welcoming, hypnotically comforting.

The core of the film, and Rogers himself, is the unassailable sense of honesty in his work and the quiet way he went about it.

For instance, he hated superheroes. When the first Superman movie was released, reports began to appear about children injuring themselves and, in some cases, dying by trying to fly like their hero.

Rogers devoted an entire program to the issue, carefully and quietly explaining the difference between Superman and reality.

Could Fred Rogers survive in today's mass entertainment culture?  I very much doubt it.

In an age of superheroes and supervillains, interplanetary wars and cartoon violence, there is no place for the quiet connections that Rogers made with the smallest of us.

But there should be.

It can be a savage world at times. Chaos seems to be the order of the day. There are plenty of damaged people and damaged children.

Such a world is desperate for more Mister Rogers. And they are out there.

There are healers like Fred Rogers in every neighbourhood. We just have to find them.

And listen to them when we do.