Every New Hampshire policy debate should start in the same place, with the same question

Nobody can end the suffering of others, but everybody has the power to reduce it.

Out in the world, it is easy to spot the affirmative embrace of that option. A door is held for the person behind, a retiree becomes a community volunteer, a “Let me help you with that” floats across a big-box parking lot. The rejection of the option is evident, too: A middle finger is flashed in traffic, a server is scolded by a diner for not meeting some arbitrary benchmark, a lie is delivered without compunction.

The same option holds true for public policy. We can start with the question, “Is this thing we are proposing intended to reduce suffering or is it meant to increase it, if only for some?” The answering can get tricky, but there are instances where complexity never truly arises, such as with human rights. When rights are denied based on something core about a person’s very existence, the intent is to deliver real suffering solely to alleviate the sense among others that they are suffering that existence.

New Hampshire’s debate over LGBTQ+ rights is a prime modern example. Some lawmakers want to repeal discrimination protections for transgender people, which would inflict real suffering on real people, and for reasons that never rise above intolerance. They do not want to acknowledge or understand another’s existence and resent being asked to try.

Even so, most people inherently apply the question of suffering to the positions they take, and that’s why you hear arguments from those who favor anti-LGBTQ bills about protecting girls and girls’ sports, and the security of locker rooms and restrooms. It makes some people suffer to think they are inflicting suffering, even when it’s at the expense of people they reject, and so they play mental games with themselves to designate their cruelties as a service to an imagined greater good.

Wisdom is little more than the ability to detect such games in ourselves. 

In many ways, the immigration debate is the same. There is a perception among some that the existence of people in America who lack the proper paperwork creates suffering for proper citizens. The explanations for why this is so run the gamut from the absurd (migrants eating pets) to the dubious (strains on housing and social services) to the fanatical (extreme isolationism and xenophobia). 

A good-faith debate over a new national immigration policy would be almost infinitely complex at the level of suffering, but the only point of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is to inflict suffering as punishment and deterrence. There’s nothing complex about it. Meanwhile, the human toll of that campaign is observably real — on victims, yes, but on witnesses and communities, too. And, again, any reduction in a “greater” suffering is imagined — and it requires the elevation of conspiracy theories and bigotry above human decency and due process.

It takes a special kind of person to physically separate families, to be the one to tackle a parent in front of a child who, in that moment, understands only that they’ve lost everything. If the question of suffering even arises for an agent of ICE, the mental games they play to explain away their cruelties would have to be extraordinary. 

The present harm of the president’s deportation effort is incalculable, and it is just the beginning. The lasting harm will haunt this nation for generations.

But cruelty is the primary currency of the Trump administration, and so any optimism that things will improve on that end in the next two years is misplaced. My hope for New Hampshire, however, is that the fundamental question of suffering is where every policy debate begins from now on. 

With our conversations about public education, that means clearly establishing from the outset that our schools are not something inflicted on taxpayers but a core tenet of society itself: that every child, regardless of family wealth or status, is owed an opportunity for a meaningful academic and social foundation provided by their community. Our charge is to find ways to pay for public schools, not dream up new ways of destroying them. 

When we talk about housing, I hope that we can start at the importance of welcoming new neighbors with lower incomes rather than the wish to “preserve town character” for existing residents. 

When we discuss investments in early care and education, I hope that we begin by considering how challenging it is to be a young working parent of modest means in a state with such a high cost of living — and the many ways those young working parents of modest means are critical to New Hampshire’s present and its future. 

When we debate elder care, I hope it is with the primary understanding that everyone grows old if they’re lucky — and not one of us can predict what our physical, mental, or financial capabilities will be when we get there.

Most of all, I hope we can begin to acknowledge something fundamental about our current divides, all of them: There is a big difference between the suffering we send out into the world to be absorbed by others and the suffering we create for ourselves and so must endure.