A Florida couple died at Bryce Canyon National Park when they fell several hundred feet after apparently climbing over a railing intended to keep visitors from approaching a cliff rim.

It’s appropriately uncomfortable when interpretive park ranger Jazmyn Bernard starts chanting “two, four, six, eight — we don’t want to integrate” on Little Rock Nine Way in front of Little Rock Central High School. Without warning, she transports our tour group back to September 1957 when Elizabeth Eckford was one of nine African American teenagers subjected to racist white mobs resisting desegregation.

In my 40 years with the National Park Service, serving under Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1&2, Clinton, and Obama, I have not witnessed such a direct assault on the values and employees embodied in the NPS.