Disadvantages in the election campaign, hope in the election campaign • New Hampshire Bulletin

As I write this, a powerful hurricane is barreling toward Florida’s Gulf Coast.

As I write, all of New Hampshire looks like a fall postcard.

As I write, nations are at war and people are sacrificing everything to protect the vulnerable.

As I write, the world oscillates between chaos and beauty, cruelty and love.

Last week, as the confrontation between Israel and Iran intensified, a Republican representative from New Hampshire tweeted that he had very little confidence in the current occupants of the White House, who “have a good handle on today’s world collapse.” It’s the kind of partisan message you’d expect during election season, but I wondered what day in history he would cite as an example of a time when the world didn’t collapse. The state of affairs has never been an either/or question, but only a question of where one looks at a given moment. Chaos and beauty, cruelty and love.

Elections rely on this duality of perceptions more than anything else. We are asked to catalog our grievances and assign blame while simultaneously searching for hope to invest in a preferred slate of candidates. That seems perfectly reasonable, but the problem is that too many people have outsourced their worries and hopes alike.

I read about it at the beginning of the month a plan The proposal, proposed by U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, would make child care in America “a vital infrastructure” at a cost of $100 billion annually. It’s a number that’s difficult to imagine – and it may well be too low. But it is a proposed investment to address what should be a central concern of the American people: the cost of living is so high that both parents must work, but the cost of child care makes it a losing proposition for many families. And while that $100 billion is “more than double what the U.S. currently spends on child care programs,” it is only “one-eighth of the federal budget allocated to national defense,” according to Time’s Nik Popli wrote about Khanna’s plan.

Whatever your opinion on Khanna’s Child Care for America Act, I hope you agree that the present and future of child care is a worthwhile conversation for the American people during an election season. But according to the Last poll According to the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, the two “most important” issues facing America after “economy/inflation” (No. 1 at 24 percent) are “border security” (19 percent) and “elections/democracy” (16 percent ). – and “child care” is nowhere to be found. While immigration policy and voting rights are also important conversations, they are topics of significantly greater concern than everyday challenges like “health care” (3 percent), “social security/medical care” (3 percent), and “education” (1 percent ) is directly related to the outsourcing of complaints.

The favored bogeyman of too much of the American right is the nameless, faceless immigrant, who is so reflexively blamed for all of America’s ills that vice presidential candidate JD Vance has even pinned the blame on them the real estate crisis. Forget what you know about your city, your state and your country — burdensome property taxes due to a broken education funding system, a lack of affordable housing, a shortage of health care workers, the prohibitive costs of child care — and focus your anger on migrants. Don’t be afraid of what you see, but rather what you imagine – foreigners voting fraudulently, taking homes and jobs from Americans, and committing unspeakable crimes – because that’s how elections are won.

It is a political template that has been used throughout history. In order to prevent the dangerous unification of the lower and middle classes, grievances must be redirected and fragmentation created. Hatred – of “others” who are more economically similar than different – ​​must be stoked.

Most of the time I have a lot of trust in individuals. Amid the many dualities of life, out in the world I see more kindness than hate, more empathy than brutality.

However, I have less trust in societies.

In an age of rapid and ubiquitous communication, fear is too easily exploited to gain and retain power. The online darkness that emerged on the right-wing fringes of American politics has spread into our public squares, town halls, and schools. Better angels were imprisoned.

That’s my main complaint.

As always, my hope remains with the people.