I was still reeling on Saturday from the breaking news of the massacre of Jewish worshippers in a synagogue in Pittsburgh when I received an email jokingly comparing insects to humans.

It was a marketing email from Fix St. Louis, a local home-repair business. The subject line said: “The Undocumented Migrants Now Heading to YOUR House.”

I was stunned. Surely, a few hours after the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in America, no one was going to send jokes comparing migrants to pests that should be exterminated. Were they? Consider the email’s first three paragraphs:

“While you have been watching the TV drama play-out (sic), thousands of Hondurans and Guatemalans marching toward our borders, you may have been missing a different type of invasion that is literally happening all around you -- one that may impact you more directly.

“As someone who’s had the privilege of living the American Dream of homeownership, you may not realize that YOUR home IN PARTICULAR is the envy of literally thousands. And as the weather has gotten colder, these individuals have become MORE emboldened, and are ready to cross your borders, penetrate your walls, and move in with you without your permission.

“But there’s good news. In this case nobody will accuse you of being a racist, bigot or xenophobe if you refer to them as ‘pests,’ fortify your walls, or even call for their extermination! So let’s get to work.”

The rest of the email outlines how to deal with damage caused by woodpeckers, squirrels, carpenter bees, spiders, ladybugs, boxelder bugs and stink bugs. I clicked the “unsubscribe” button on the email, and when prompted to say why, I noted that it was racist.

I reached out to the company’s owner, Steve Boriss, to ask him about the content of the email. He wrote to me saying that he “sincerely did not understand what our newsletter had to do with race.”

“It requires imagination to suggest the newsletter makes any implications at all -- whether they are good people or whether they are doing a bad thing. It just isn’t in there,” he wrote. Regardless, he refused to talk to me because he said it appeared my mind was made up by the reason I gave for unsubscribing.

That’s unfortunate. I would have pointed out that the email directly calls the destructive pests he lists “undocumented migrants.”

It’s in the subject line.

“Undocumented migrants” is a term used to describe people: real humans fleeing their countries for desperate reasons. It is not a term that should be used to describe termites and rodents.

Plenty of research shows that using dehumanizing language to describe groups of people is harmful because it is easier to commit injustices and atrocities against those you’re convinced are not truly human -- more like stink bugs looking to invade. Dehumanizing words have long been used as weapons to convince otherwise “normal” people to go along with horrors and injustice.

Where else have we seen people compare groups of humans to animals? Just two weeks ago, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan tweeted anti-Semitic remarks comparing Jews to termites. Farrakhan posted a clip to Twitter of a speech he gave, captioned, “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.”

When rhetoric like “infesting” is used by political leaders and Fox News hosts to describe people, they are invoking the same hateful language and imagery as Farrakhan -- and worse. It’s even more disgusting when outright lies -- such as claiming, without proof, that Middle Eastern terrorists are among the caravan, or that the migrants are infected with smallpox, a disease that has been eradicated -- are used to stir hatred and fear. The alleged shooter who killed 11 innocent worshippers was said to have been radicalized by right-wing pundits spreading conspiracies about Jewish leaders helping refugees.

Earlier this week, the Huffington Post reported that Patrick Stein, one of three right-wing militiamen found guilty in April of a conspiracy to kill Muslim refugees living in rural Kansas, offered an interesting defense. Stein’s attorneys said their client got caught up in the anti-Muslim information he was devouring online and from conservative talk show hosts such as Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. Stein referred to Muslims as “cockroaches” he wanted exterminated, according to the report.

Dehumanization starts with language.

We try to teach our children that words matter. They should not be used to degrade other people. That point is more challenging to explain when kids see and hear dehumanizing language from supposedly mature adults -- from the president to TV pundits to a local business owner.

The most discouraging part of the marketing email I received is not that Boriss refused to have a conversation about why it might be wrong to make the sort of comparisons he did.

It’s that this kind of dehumanizing language has become so normal and mainstream for a segment of Americans that they cannot even begin to see a problem with it.

The day after the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, this February, a fire alarm went off in the building where Angela Lamb’s daughter attends school.

Her daughter came home rattled.

“OK, now it’s happening to us,” was her daughter’s reaction in that moment of alarm, as she told her mother.

“That fact that this is what enters their minds ... I felt like I had to do something,” Lamb said.

With each new school shooting, she had felt rising anxiety about her children’s safety. A mom of two school-aged children in St. Louis County, Lamb had never been politically active before. She didn’t consider herself a “political person.”

But she could no longer watch reports of children killed by and running from mass shooters in their schools.

Lamb had previously made a short documentary about her journey of being diagnosed with a chronic illness and how to treat it. Now, she reached out to another documentary filmmaker, also a mom, in Washington, D.C.

Nancy Frohman was also feeling compelled to act when Lamb called her. Frohman wanted to find a way to support the Parkland student survivors begging for changes to the country’s gun laws. Lamb suggested making a coast-to-coast documentary about the March For Our Lives, a student-led protest on March 24 against gun violence, calling for reform to gun regulations.

Frohman got on board and put together a crew in D.C. Lamb recruited volunteers for a crew in St. Louis. She was referred to another woman filmmaker in Los Angeles, Alana Jackler, who agreed to handle coverage from the West Coast.

Combined, they had zero budget for the project. But plenty of passion.

Lamb was still making calls and recruiting people days before the march. In the process of interviewing young people and parents involved with the gun-sense movement, Lamb said she learned more productive ways of talking about gun reform.

“We purposely wanted to make it nonpartisan. It’s anti-gun violence, not anti-guns,” she said.

They pulled it off. Lamb still had to find a way to turn their raw footage into a film, though, and so she turned to another mom friend with school-aged children.

Michele Steinberg agreed to help edit the film, but she struggled with whether to attach her name to a project that could attract negative attention from those opposed to their message. She debated what to do for a couple of weeks.

Eventually, she decided to add her name to the credits.

“I thought anything like this that is worth doing was worth putting my name on,” she said. “I would put my name on it to help other people stand up.”

Those who worked on the 19-minute documentary, entitled “No More Thoughts and Prayers,” don’t believe that reforming gun laws should be a partisan issue. The vast majority of Americans already support common-sense measures like fixing the way background checks are conducted for potential gun buyers.

“No one is in favor of children getting shot in school,” Lamb said. “What can we do to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future?”

She decided to release the film on Amazon’s video-on-demand service, where it is $1.99 to rent and $4.99 to buy. The proceeds will go toward Moms Demand Action, a group lobbying for better laws regulating guns.

She wants people to watch it with an open mind and realize that concerned parents from either political party can contact their representatives and let them know that they support reforming the laws that make it so easy for mass shooters to legally obtain weapons.

Steinberg said she was motivated to support the Parkland student activists who felt let down by the adults around them -- legislators beholden to a lobby working to protect and strengthen the position of gun manufacturers.

“I’m just one person,” she said. “But maybe I can motivate others.”

When making an ultra-low-budget independent film, you call in lots of favors.

That’s why a film crew and I were shooting in my friends’ sprawling suburban house and backyard. I had convinced them to relocate their noisy rooster to our backyard and open their elegantly decorated home to more than a dozen 4- and 5-year-old girls, who would be extras in this scene.

We were shooting a princess-themed birthday party on a sweltering August day. The crew was dripping in sweat. The children could only go outside for short periods of time, so they were mostly cooped up inside and getting antsy.

Between takes for a key scene, someone mentioned that one parent and child had taken off after the girl spilled red Gatorade all over the light-colored living room rug. My heart sank, and I immediately went to clean it.

Then my phone rang. My husband, who was dropping off our daughter at a camp in Texas, said our neighbor had called him because the rooster had escaped our yard and was strutting around theirs, terrorizing their dog.

This was shortly after one of the teenage extras, wearing an old bridesmaid dress of mine and playing the role of a party wrangler, said she felt woozy because of the heat and nearly passed out. Meanwhile, my director and cinematographer were having some serious “creative differences” on set.

At this moment, I wondered what had possessed me to want to make a film in the first place. I had zero experience in filmmaking. But I had a story I had written and a vision for how it could be told.

I quickly realized that I would need to surround myself with experienced people who knew what they were doing. I gave myself a crash course in filmmaking via the internet and friends who were willing to share their expertise.

And it turned out that I had some relevant skills after all. In that moment of chaos, I did what parents everywhere have learned to do: prioritize, improvise and delegate. I focused on trying to get the stain out of the rug, sent people to corral the rooster and tried to avert any more princess meltdowns.

A year after that shoot, after post-production headaches and some despair about whether this project would ever get done, we had a nine-minute short film that brought to life what I had imagined on a page.

I had written and produced my first film. The stain came out of the carpet, the rooster was unharmed and the tiny princesses all looked adorable.

I didn’t intend to make a film to teach my children anything. I simply felt compelled by a story. But looking back, I realized that when I shared my crazy behind-the-scenes stories with them, I was deliberately showing them the many challenges we faced because I wanted them to see how to respond when they inevitably faced obstacles on their own journeys.

I wanted them to see me struggle with something unfamiliar. I told them when potential funders said “no” after hearing my pitch. I shared the times that film festivals rejected my project. I let them see my doubts and insecurities. I wanted them to know that ambitious projects take time and suffer setbacks along the way.

Reaching tough goals requires some failure. Modern parents work so hard to shield our children from it. But that doesn’t do them any favors in the long run.

When we finally started showing the film to audiences this fall and hearing great feedback, I also shared my joy with my kids.

I reinforced that we had achieved some measure of success because many people worked so hard toward a common goal. I wanted them to share my pride in having figured things out, working together with a team to create something beautiful.

Adolescents feel so much pressure to achieve. They jam-pack their school schedules and load up their extracurriculars. They constantly get the message that one misstep, one bad grade, one significant rejection will ruin their chance at a successful future.

That’s simply not true.

They will deal with their own runaway roosters, overheated princesses and disastrous spills.

It turns out that’s part of the magic of making something worthwhile.