“How in the world did these horrors become “the new normal?’”

I have a feeling beauty pageants have become so much more popular nowadays because of the reigning chaos in our world.

World peace, the favorite bon mot among those who regard these beauty tilts askance, is really a deep-seated wish among human beings, I think.

Joke all you want about the importance of pageants —- in the end, it is really about wanting something better to look at than bloody messes and children wailing because of abandonment, disease or separation.

Take the refugee crisis that had recently drawn attention to America’s policies about immigration. President Donald Trump’s determined efforts to prevent the US from becoming “a migrant camp” became very obvious recently.

Writer Jason Beaubien says in his June 20, 2017 article posted in the National Public Radio, Inc. (NPRI) website, “A shockingly high percent of the world’s displaced are kids.”

He adds, “More than half the refugees around the globe are under the age of 18, even though children make up 31 percent of the world’s population.”

A few weeks ago, news reports showed how children were being forcibly separated from their parents at the border of US and Mexico.

It is a distressing sight — a child holding on tightly to a parent’s leg, desperate to stay with the person who loves him most.

The world probably has already shown him how unloving, unkind and uncompromising it can be. And all we can do from afar is watch them be drawn away in tears.

According to a Vox.com article in May 2018, “Between October 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018, at least 2,700 children have been split from their parents. 1,995 of them were separated over the last six weeks of that window — April 18 to May 31 — indicating that at present, an average of 45 children are being taken from their parents each day.”

A caption reads, “On May 7, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy of prosecuting everyone caught crossing the border illegally (between ports of entry), launching the family-separation policy in its current form.”

The children, the article notes, were “labeled ‘unaccompanied minors’ and sent to government custody or foster care, the parents labeled criminals and sent to jail.”

The whole thing stinks of discrimination. And the US leader’s latent character.

How in the world did these horrors become “the new normal?”

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reports the “number of people forcibly displaced from their homes is the highest since World War II.”

It adds, “65.6 million people are currently living as refugees or as displaced persons inside their own countries. This includes 10.3 million people who were uprooted from their homes in 2016.”

The largest source of refugees is still Syria, followed by South Sudan. Wars have been raging in these countries for many years — Syria since 2011 and Sudan since 2013.

War, as we know from the Marawi siege last year, can displace so many families and leave orphans and injuries far deeper than the ones that doctors can heal.

Needless to say, the effect of displacement and migration has reached many countries, from Europe to Asia. The migrant problem soon escalated to crisis levels, with countries crafting new policies to deal with the surge.

What happens to refugees or people driven out of the lives they used to know? International law says they have a right to protection.

The UNHCR notes, “A refugee has the right to safe asylum. However, international protection comprises more than physical safety. Refugees should receive at least the same rights and basic help as any other foreigner who is a legal resident, including freedom of thought, of movement, and freedom from torture and degrading treatment.”

This is why Donald Trump got such widespread condemnation — his degrading statements unveiled a view so vile it could be worse than actual war. In fact, beliefs like that can cause violence to erupt.

Of course, he was referring to “violent MS-13 gang members” at the time, but still, his words were related to what his critics call a “draconian set of immigration polices.”

And it is not just America, but everyone in the world, who must accept the moral responsibility to address the refugee crisis.

World peace, indeed, will only ever be a dream — a beauty-queen-wannabe’s safe haven when questions get too difficult to answer — if we close our eyes to the hard truths about who we are as human beings today.