Earlier this year, we (barely) recognized the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre. It was drowned out by the latest presidential tweets, but some attention squeaked through. Up to 500 Vietnamese–men, women, children, and infants–were massacred by a couple dozen American soldiers in two different hamlets. Some women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. It’s disturbing to think that Americans could do such a thing, but they did. WE did.

The entire world learned about My Lai. Learned what America was capable of. It’s a stain on our national character. But it was 50 years ago. There has been nothing similar since.

Then, during the Bush Administration, we had torture, Abu Graib, Guantanamo, renditions. We justified torturing prisoners, and we tortured a lot of them, routinely and repeatedly. News reports in countries around the world delivered the news–that the United States approved of torture. It shocked them, dashed their image of America.

Our current president approves of torture, but the nation won’t allow it. We’ve realized it’s wrong. Hopefully the world recognizes our about-face. And it’s been 15 years.

But now, in recent weeks, news outlets worldwide are showing pictures of US authorities forcing children away from their parents and taking them to special facilities. Most everyone, worldwide, is shocked by this. Don’t traumatize children: it’s kind of a universal value. And certainly don’t use them as bargaining chips to pursue a political agenda, as the administration admitted it was intentionally doing. I don’t think any of us are proud of this.

The world has seen, once again, that the United States is capable of great evil. And they are disappointed, because we’ve always stood for what’s right. And so much good still comes from us.

We stain our national character in other ways. We’ve got the world’s highest incarceration rate. Throw in the continual mass shootings, which no other nation experiences. We are among the world’s leaders in executing criminals, though most Western nations long ago rejected the death penalty. Throw in President Trump’s threats to use nuclear weapons, an idea the world, since the 1940s, has tried not to even whisper about because the consequences are so grave.

We bring shame on ourselves in so many ways. And we seem to keep finding ways to show the world that we are capable of great evil.

We claim to be a shining city on a hill. We usually have been. But that’s not what the world is seeing now. That really bothers me.