This is something like a call for calm.
There’s a good chance this call will be poorly received, or that it will fall on deaf ears. That “this election season,” with alarm over the race for the White House at a deafening pitch, with posters torn in two and plucked from yards, a fighting spirit may seem to some readers the only one that makes sense.
To date, the national news cycle has been as rough as feared. “Both sides” appear to want gloves off. We are inundated with seemingly hourly name-calling, veiled and un-veiled threats, increasingly peculiar pledges and an overwhelming volume of claims and counterclaims doomed to be unproven.
When the name Adolf Hitler is being tossed back and forth like a frisbee, it’s clear we have lost our collective way.
This year’s presidential candidates can – and will – engage in mud-slinging and one-upmanship. We do not have to carry that into our own lives and communities. As much as they can choose to lower the tone, we can choose to bring the temperature down. Indeed, if we have any hope of more productive and cooperative public lives, it has to come down.
Voting is critically important for reasons far simpler and greater than “do or die.” No voter should feel as though they are left without a choice.
The disillusionment and doubt felt by the American electorate at this moment in history unites us more than we realize. The continued degradation of dialogue, debate, compromise and other basic undertakings makes the political arena deeply uninviting. We’ll wait forever for promising, determined and open-minded new entrants to politics, at all levels if things deteriorate any further.
If we can successfully mount a return to more serene, civil interactions on the subject of politics, if we can take a deep breath and not be gripped by fear of the subject, or fear of an electoral outcome that is not our first preference, we will be better for it.
As it is, we are far too reluctant to engage with each other. Where does that leave us?
Recent dispatches by this newspaper from towns like Hampden and Berwick reveal residents to “tread carefully,” studiously avoiding politics and skating by one another rather than daring to start a conversation. Think of the suspicion this promotes, the damaging sense of isolation it can create. We are all surely capable of more than this.
Back in February, an Associated Press report came close to sounding a death knell for Maine’s “long-cherished reputation for political independence.”
“The shift reflected in new voter registration numbers and an increasingly pugilistic political environment has nudged an electorate with a well-earned reputation for pragmatic moderation further into the political fray,” the report read. “So-called independents, or unenrolled voters, have gone from the state’s largest voting bloc to trailing both major parties in just four years.”
Enrolling with one or other party is not a failing – nor is it a blood oath, much as the national press might prefer to look at it that way.
Analyzing the results of a survey released last week (a poll that found one in three Maine respondents lacking in confidence as to the “integrity” of the presidential election), Nicholas Jacobs, faculty associate director of the Goldfarb Center, which co-conducted the survey, referred to the trend of contemporary politics becoming “hyper-nationalized.”
“If we ask people about Maine’s elections, confidence is much higher, but if we ask about national elections, Mainers are tapped into the same national political narrative as everybody else,” Jacobs told the Press Herald. “We’re no longer privileged enough to only see politics through our particular local lens.”
Let’s take steps to adjust our focus and open our minds. The downward slide can be left to the highest office. A return to that particular local lens, a return to day-to-day clarity in spite of the increasingly noxious fog of the “national narrative,” is something that might require a special, concerted effort. It’s an effort that will pay off handsomely. And if any state can do it, Maine can do it.
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