“Put a pin in it.” Image used by Creative Commons license.

“‘Families Belong Together’ is the wrong slogan,” says Masha Gessen, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. The latest round of immigration protests came about in response to a very specific policy and very specific images: children screaming and crying as they were ripped away from their parents at the border. First-time protestors, conservative protestors, Republican protestors all took up signs with long-time protestors, liberal protestors, Democratic protestors. I saw a greater than expected range of political diversity in the Chicago crowd. All over on the media when people were asked why they were marching, the message was the same: families belong together.

But was this a waste of a good march? While she does not discard the point of the marches and says that they did serve an important function, Gessen also says they obscured the larger…