In my adult life, I’ve listened repeatedly to various Republicans craft language to fan insecurity and fear. President Ronald Reagan said “I’m here from the government and… .” With President George W. Bush, it was “weapons of mass destruction,” and with President Donald Trump it was and still is that Mexican hoards of drug-addicted rapists are headed toward your wives and daughters.
Meanwhile fundamental problems like gun violence, wealth/income inequality, immigration reform and the global climate crisis have been ignored. Democrats have written legislation to address these issues, then get labeled as big spenders,who now are being blamed for inflation caused by Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic. Sen. Mitch McConnell and the rest of his Republican friends just keep saying no, yet have no solutions to offer.
During the racial unrest triggered by police brutality, there were very reasonable suggestions that some of the funds used to militarize the cops would be better spent on underlying mental illness/substance-use disorders, but the fear-mongering Republican spin doctors falsely labeled this “defunding the police.”
For over thre- dozen years I was an addiction therapist who dealt with co-occuring mental disorders. As an ambulance driver, I repeatedly saw that we offered an expensive taxi cab for alcohol/drug-abusing patients, yet had no effective treatment programs for them. Today, the drugs are far more dangerous, yet there is far less help available, especially in New Hampshire.
As any enlightened police officer knows, these people aren’t bad, but rather sick people, who without treatment naturally act badly, repeatedly. So if society wants to make police work far safer, because now domestic violence is very dangerous violence, it must fund the social safety net.
Mike Beebe
Lyndeborough