God saddled humanity with a terrible handicap.

That handicap is tribalism. We all suffer from it, and it’s everywhere in our daily lives.

Some tribes are innocent. Whether you root for the University of Michigan or Michigan State University, passions are high, voices are strident, muscles are taut, palms moist and a sense of proportion sometimes suffers. All-in-all, though, sport competitions are enjoyable, and sometimes even productive.

However, humans also group themselves into nations, racial groups, religious groups, language groups, economic groups, educational attainment groups and all sorts of political groups. Humans even group themselves into male and female, which are sometimes hostile to each other, something that is truly hard for me to understand.

At the other end of arbitrary tribal rivalry such as the Wolverines and Spartans, are racial and religious tribes that have struggled at various times against other tribes, with the intent to murder and oppress.

My life was changed after I visited Auschwitz in 2002. I had read history about Nazi efforts to exterminate all Jews, Romani, homosexuals, communists, etc. However, nothing can match standing in front of an oven where thousands of humans were burned after being gassed in an industrial program of mass death.

There are some people today who still admire the Nazis — unbelievable!

In our own country, millions of human beings were held in bondage.

These human beings could be bought and sold. Whatever they produced was owned by another human. Even their children became the property of another human. Marriage meant nothing. It was illegal to teach slaves to read in many states.

Some people today still believe that other races should be oppressed simply based on the color of that race’s skin — unbelievable!

President Trump responded to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, by criticizing all extremists. Up to that point, he was doing the right thing.

Why did he stop short of directly condemning white supremacists and Neo Nazis, though?

He didn’t directly state that those groups were anathema until Monday, when opinion had crashed against the walls of the White House. President Trump seemed truly surprised.

Has President Trump really thought about what happened to us before the Civil War, or what happened in Europe before and during World War II?  If an educated person had thought about slavery and the Holocaust, a condemnation of racial supremacy and Nazi attitudes would have instantaneously erupted from that person’s lips Saturday afternoon.

I don’t know why it didn’t happen. Maybe all the facts weren’t known about what happened in Charlottesville, so President Trump didn’t want to make the similar error that President Obama made when similar occurrences happened during his presidency.

Don’t misunderstand me. President Trump this time missed the opportunity to lead. Even if all the facts weren’t known, he should have reflexively condemned racial supremacists and Neo Nazis. If balance were warranted, he could have added that later.

I am not trying to excuse him now, and I have criticized his behavior in the past. Then I thought he was crude, unfair, unduly sarcastic and not presidential.

Now I wonder if President Trump has a conscience.

I will pray that President Trump doesn’t blunder into a truly horrible situation. As the North Korean nuclear and missile crisis indicates, there are moral minefields everywhere. It will require a sophisticated and thoughtful president to lead us to safety.

I have one final, practical thought that doesn’t involve conscience: a swift condemnation of hate groups might reduce the possibility of more violence in the future.

At least that should have occurred to President Trump.

Michael Waldron is a retired lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, who was born and raised in Niles. He previously served on the Niles Community School Board of Education. He can be reached at ml.waldron@sbcglobal.net.