Darryl Diggs Jr. stood outside the Parkway Early Childhood Center in suburban St. Louis at 4:30 a.m., wondering if he had failed his children.

He was third in line the day preschool registration began. His wife had researched the district’s preschool options, and they were focused on getting their son into one specific location.

It was dark and cold that morning. He stood outside the door for four hours, a long line growing behind him, until the doors opened at 8:30 am. He wanted the other parents to see that he was waiting in line just like them -- that his position as an assistant principal in the district didn’t give him an advantage in the process.

But what if he was unable to secure one of the limited spots for his child?

He thought about how his Black ancestors and his parents had stood in lines and sacrificed for their children’s futures. He thought about how far his parents had come from their childhoods in the inner city of Memphis and the high expectations they placed on him and his siblings.

He wondered if his children would one day have to stand in line to secure a great education for their own kids.

Diggs, now the executive director for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility at the Special School District of St. Louis County, wants a world where parents don’t have to queue up and hope to get one of the limited spots for the education their child needs.

“Who’s willing to work and fight for that?” he asked me, as he recounted that experience from eight years ago.

He planned to share this story, and pose this question, as one of the speakers at an Oct. 5 storytelling event celebrating the value of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility -- commonly abbreviated as DEI.

Heather Fleming, founder and executive director of Missouri Equity Education Partnership, organized the event in an attempt to counter disinformation about DEI initiatives. While some have turned the effort to encourage diversity into a political issue -- at least 10 states have passed laws limiting these programs, especially in education -- others may be unaware of how such initiatives benefit people, institutions and society.

Learning about others’ experiences offers students a global worldview, allowing them to connect with people from all walks of life, Diggs said. Having a diversity of perspectives fosters innovation and creativity, and it enhances decision-making and problem-solving. For businesses, research consistently shows that fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace improves employee engagement and retention, and increases customer satisfaction and market reach.

In contrast, laws that lead to book bans and censored history lessons hurt society by increasing division and reinforcing biases, Fleming said. In Missouri, schools banned 333 books during the 2022-2023 school year -- the third-highest number of book bans in the U.S.

That’s what Fleming hoped to counter with the event, in which people from various backgrounds shared their stories about how DEI work has affected their lives and those around them.

Diggs said his family lived in Panama and Guatemala for a while when he was young, and that the exposure to other cultures "changed my life for the better." When he came back to St. Louis, he noticed how segmented and divided it was -- and he questioned why, because he had seen something different elsewhere.

He wants his biracial sons to be exposed to diverse cultures, perspectives and backgrounds so they can connect with their peers in the richest way possible, he said.

He thinks back to that day of preschool registration and the hours of freezing while waiting outside.

All that shivering paid off when he got inside and managed to secure a spot for his son.

My longstanding feud with the wildlife in my backyard took an odd turn this summer.

Typically, the feud involves me trying to discourage the deer from eating my hostas and flowers. But this season, my husband sprayed deer repellent earlier than usual, and it actually worked. Feeling a little overconfident in my amateur gardening skills, I decided to plant a variety of seeds and flowers.

It didn’t take very long for the rodents to discover this buffet.

I’m sure the squirrels had something to do with the dirt flung out of the pots. But the holes burrowed in the ground, the uprooted bulbs and the chewed-up plants looked to be work of chipmunks.

A family of them have lived under our patio for as long as I can remember; I’ve spotted them furtively darting about the flower beds, plotting a crime spree. In the past, I’ve accepted this as part of the deal of having a backyard. This time, I was incensed by their brazen destruction. I began thinking about the ethics of getting rid of the chipmunks -- for good.

Would it be morally permissible to kill a sentient, living being simply for the sake of a flower garden? I was deeply conflicted about the idea. On one hand, the chipmunks have a well-established pattern of ruinous behavior on our property. On the other hand, I’m not growing crops to feed my family.

I talked to several close friends, and got just as many opinions. I thought about writing to The New York Times' Ethicist or asking our imam.

Weeks passed as I mulled this moral dilemma.

One recent morning, when I took Frankie outside to take care of his business, we both noticed a small brown animal moving in the grass. My dog's dreams of catching prey seemed about to come true. But I could not bear to witness a chipmunk murder before my eyes.

As Frankie raced toward the animal, I hollered "Leave it!" at the top of my lungs. Surprisingly, he listened -- not a skill he is usually known for. He sniffed near the chipmunk and raced back toward me.

The intensity of my emotions around the prospect of this rodent’s demise startled me. Seeing something die in front of you is a different experience than calling an exterminator -- even though the result is the same.

It made me think about how many gruesome acts we might support from a distance, but recoil from if witnessed up close. How many of us would eat meat if we had to slaughter the animals ourselves? How many of us would kill other human beings in a war?

Philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have debated the role emotions play in forming our values. Moral emotions -- the feelings and intuitions that play a major role in most of our ethical decision-making -- may come from cultural conditioning or even an innate, evolutionary instinct. Empathy and compassion are important moral emotions that we teach our children in the hopes that they become caring members of society.

Of course, we all value different things.

This comes into sharp focus every four years and plays out in 30-second morality plays on our screens. This time around, one of the signature election-year proposals is mass deportations. Former President Donald Trump is promising to round up and deport immigrants who are here illegally, which would mean expelling around 11 million people from America.

Among his supporters, I bet there are those who gleefully cheer for this kind of mass expulsion. Others might not support it, but are unbothered by the rhetoric because they believe it’s an impossible plan -- one that would collapse too many vital industries and would never happen for logistical or legal reasons.

There’s probably also a fair number who support the idea theoretically, but if they had to personally wrench an immigrant mother away from her American-born children, they might balk at it.

If you had to look a person in the eye -- someone who may have been your neighbor for years, might clean your home or do your church’s lawn work or have repaired your roof -- could you kick them out of their home and banish them from their family? Could you do it to millions of people who have done nothing but work, pay taxes and try to live decent lives here?

In short, could you knowingly bring on the suffering of someone in your own backyard?

I decided to pay attention to my instinctive reaction to protect the chipmunk in my yard.

It’s not as complicated as I once thought.

Much of the American electorate has grown numb to Donald Trump’s bizarre social media posts.

But Trump jolted even the most jaded observers with an outlandish all-caps statement on Sunday: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” The former president offered no additional explanation.

Trump is well known for the insults he aims at his adversaries. He has criticized and mocked plenty of women. But this wasn’t an insult: It was a direct declaration of hatred.

He’s never posted “I HATE HILLARY CLINTON” or “I HATE KAMALA HARRIS,” both political opponents he seems to loathe. He’s never posted “I HATE E. JEAN CARROLL,” a woman whose case led to a jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and owing her $83 million for defamation. He’s never posted that he hates Fani Willis or Letitia James, two prosecutors who have investigated him.

Merriam-Webster defines hate as "intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger or sense of injury." When children have an outburst saying they “hate” someone or something, parents should try to get them to process the emotion and figure out the root cause of such an intense feeling. After all, letting hatred fester inside oneself is corrosive.

This, however, was not a harmless, healthy expression of emotion. This was a powerful man -- a former president who is seeking the office again -- telling his millions of followers about his hatred of a much-younger woman.

What could possess a 78-year-old man to go after a 34-year-old pop star? Does Trump even understand why he lashed out?

Let’s try to help Trump process his big feelings. Here are a few things that might be behind his hatred of Taylor Swift:

-- She rejected him. Swift endorsed Harris in a moment when Trump was particularly vulnerable. He had just lost the debate in rather spectacular fashion when Swift dropped the hammer via an Instagram post. It may have been even more galling to him that her endorsement of Harris barely even mentioned his name -- just that his website had posted a fake, creepy AI image of her. An all-out attack would have at least given him the attention he craves.

-- She’s much more popular than he is. Trump respects celebrity, and Swift is one of the biggest celebrities on the planet. She has 284 million followers on Instagram. The most he ever had on Twitter was 88.9 million.

-- Her crowds are way bigger than his. She sells out stadiums with close to 100,000 seats -- and those all are people who paid to see her. His rallies this year have had an average crowd size of about 5,600, according to Crowd Counting Consortium.

-- She ignored his compliments. He's called her “very beautiful” multiple times -- “unusually beautiful,” in an interview for the new book "Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass." She didn’t even care.

-- He believes she owes him. In February, Trump posted on Truth Social, "I signed and was responsible for the Music Modernization Act for Taylor Swift and all other Musical Artists. Joe Biden didn’t do anything for Taylor, and never will." He added that Swift endorsing Biden would be "disloyal to the man who made her so much money."

-- She’s not intimidated by him. Trump has ruined ordinary people’s lives with lies about them -- Georgia election workers and Haitian immigrants, to name a few -- but he can’t do that to her. Swift has her own power, and he has no control over her.

-- He’s scared of her. He knows she has a massive and loyal fanbase, and that her endorsement will matter to some of them. Also, she is using her massive influence to register new voters. She posted a link to Vote.gov and encouraged her fans to register. In 24 hours, 400,000 people clicked through from her link to the federal site for voting information. Trump seems to be intimidated about what this means for the election.

-- She made his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, look ridiculous for insulting single women who own cats by signing her post “Childless Cat Lady.” Touche.

-- She’s a real billionaire. In eight months, her Eras Tour grossed a record-breaking $1 billion on a single tour.

In a song from her latest album, Swift asks a lyrical question: "Could someone give a message to the smallest man who ever lived?"

The Swifties have spoken, Donald: This beef won’t go well for you.