Let me tell you something that's been making the rounds, and it stirred me up good. The Gateway Pundit has a piece up arguing that the last administration's border rules encouraged child trafficking, and the viral videos at the center of it are getting a lot of attention.

Folks, I taught fourth grade for 34 years. I can spot a scared child from across a playground. When footage circulates of detained adults with children, people start asking fair questions about whether those children actually belong to the adults holding them. Critics of the old policies have said for years that the rules created an incentive to show up at the border with a child, and they said it loudly. For a long time, they got called heartless for even bringing it up.

Now the videos are doing some of the arguing for them. I can't tell you what every frame of that footage proves, and neither can anybody else hollering on television. But the concern behind it is serious, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a lecture. When critics say children were being passed between strangers to game the system, the proper response is to investigate, not to roll your eyes and change the subject.

The part that gets me the most is the silence. The loudest voices crying over every enforcement photo had very little to say about the tough questions being raised about how children crossing the border were handled from one end to the other. Whether those questions turn out to have ugly answers, we deserve to know. A country that can't ask who a child belongs to, out of fear of looking mean, has lost its nerve, and nerve is exactly what this subject requires.

Every child brought across that border by a stranger is somebody's son or daughter. Somebody back home may have been lied to, or paid a smuggler, or worse. The critics say the old policies made children a ticket in, and whether that's the full story or only part of it, the traffickers of this world pay close attention to what we enforce and what we wave through. We should pay at least as much attention as they do.

The men and women doing enforcement work today aren't the villains the television makes them out to be. They're the ones stuck sorting out hard cases, asking who belongs to whom, while half the country screams at them for doing it. They deserve a fair hearing, and they usually get mud instead.

So when you see one of those videos, don't just scroll past, and don't swallow it whole either. Ask the questions the critics have been asking, and demand real answers. I keep a picture of my grandkids on my fridge, and every time this subject comes up, I look at it. Every child crossing that border belongs on somebody's fridge too.

That's all I've got today. Talk soon, and say the pledge with somebody you love this week.