When my youngest sister confided in me three years ago that she was considering a run for public office, her babies were 1 and 2 years old. She was a sleep-deprived working mom whose husband also put in long hours as an attorney.

I encouraged her, because I know how much she has to offer the world, but in my heart, I worried about the toll such a campaign might take on her health and family. Rabeea is nearly a decade younger than me, and I have a maternal kind of protectiveness toward her. I also know how she gets when she puts her mind to a goal. She graduated a year early from our competitive high school in Houston. My parents said the sprawling University of Texas campus in Austin would be too much for a 16-year-old graduate, but she went anyway. She worked her way through high school and college and won a merit scholarship to law school.

My sister doesn’t mess around when it comes to reaching the goals she sets for herself. So when she decided to run for district judge in Houston’s Harris County in 2016, we watched her pour her entire heart into the campaign. My parents and siblings stepped up to help with the kids, but really, it was my sister who found a way to spend every waking hour meeting with voters, fundraising, attending events, speaking to groups, continuing to work as a lawyer and still picking up her kids after school nearly every day. She expanded the definition of what constitutes “waking hours.”

I watched in awe.

Where did she get that energy, that drive?

I wanted that win for her more than anything I have ever wanted for myself. She forced a runoff in a heavily contested primary, but ultimately lost in the special election.

I couldn’t bear to think about all those countless hours and sacrifices she had made when the results came in that night. It’s pretty crushing when someone you believe in so strongly loses.

And that’s when my sister showed her mettle.

She decided to run again in 2018 -- this time, against a well-established incumbent.

My father called me soon after she told us, and asked me why she would put herself through such a grind again. Texas wasn’t ready to elect a judge who looked like her, he said, speaking from the experience of an immigrant who faced his own setbacks despite decades of hard work. I wondered if he was right. The political environment had only worsened since her first attempt.

We kept our doubts to ourselves. And if my sister had any, she didn’t indulge them. Instead, she got to work -- winning endorsements, talking to as many people in the third-largest county in the country as humanly possible. Then, a few months before the election, she was in a catastrophic car accident, which she miraculously survived with a few broken bones.

She resumed campaigning even when it hurt to take a full breath because her ribs were still healing.

I couldn’t sleep the night before the midterm elections. Rabeea sent our family a text that night, which said, in part: “Regardless of the result tomorrow night, I’ve won for having the best family a person could only dream of. There’s no way possible I could have gotten to this point without each of you.”

Her older son, now 5, asked her the morning of the election what would happen if she lost.

“It’s OK to lose, so long as you give your best, because we all have to lose sometimes,” she told him.

Her younger son, 4, piped up: “I know Momma’s gonna win.”

The day of the midterms, there was a knock at my door, and my son called out to me that someone had sent me a fruit bouquet. Turns out that my sister, facing the election of her career, to which she had devoted the past three years of her life, had remembered that my short film was premiering that night in St. Louis. She wrote that she was proud of the work I was doing.

Really, Rabeea?

When I walked out of the Tivoli theater that night, I saw a message in our family group chat that she had won. More than 630,000 people in Harris County voted for her -- electing her by a margin of over 100,000 votes.

“For me, this is the America that I know, love and will fight for until we get back on track,” she wrote to me.

I tried to think of a moment in my life when I had ever felt more proud, and I realized it had been two years ago, when Rabeea told me that she was going to run again.

I called my parents to congratulate them. They were in shock.

“I can’t believe it,” my father said. “I just can’t believe it.”

The country where he arrived nearly 50 years ago with little money and lots of dreams had just made his daughter a judge.

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.”