My Turn: Reexamine the Granite State’s priorities

Healthcare for profit. Incarceration for profit. Education for profit. Waging war for profit. Planetary destruction for profit. Vilifying and dehumanizing people of color for profit. Creating gun ownership frenzy for profit. It’s been this way since forever. Enriching the few on the backs of people of color and white people who are duped into fearing people of color lest they come together, organize and rise up.

When will people begin to see they have been conned? We’re being used to maintain the wealth of a few. The deep division here amongst us is a product of decades of scheming and policy-making to keep the obscenely wealthy in control of the narrative, and consequently the policy.

While the powers-that-be are scarfing up all the cookies, they’re patting each other on the back and laughing at us as we fight over the crumbs. Those who fear the loss of privilege should people of color demand their rights need to recognize that it’s only a zero-sum if you’re only considering the crumbs.

The free-staters who now have control of the New Hampshire legislature have fallen for this narrative hook, line and sinker. With Gov. Sununu looking the other way, they are now in control doing the bidding of the wealthy elite of the state and the nation, only to shoot themselves in the foot by advocating for policies that make their own lives more of a struggle. And incidentally, are the women among them happy to let the government make their reproductive choices?

They believed the former occupant of the oval office who campaigned on, among other promises, lowering health care premiums, co-pays, and prescription costs. During his term, my health insurance costs increased almost fifty percent. As long as healthcare is for profit, millions will not access the health care they need to live.

They believed that their guy was protecting them from immigrants, whose families are still being torn apart. We’re still seeing the crippling repercussions of essential jobs not being filled by immigrants and jobs that people literally cannot afford to take. Policies denying paid family leave, worker safety, living wages and job security are killing working people.

They believed their guy denying climate change for his corporate puppet masters while people’s homes were being blown to bits, swallowed by landslides, swept away by floods and burned to embers in extreme weather events.

With gerrymandering, purging voter rolls, closing polling places, and otherwise disenfranchising the populace, we’ll keep ending up with corporate-controlled legislators who ignore the will of the people and genuflect to their donors. Keeping their jobs is more important to them than the path to democracy and the lives of their constituents.

Even with the glimmer of hope of a federal budget that begins to address the needs of the people and recognize the planetary crisis, President Biden has now unleashed unfettered drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a system designed to perpetuate itself.

The alternative is to organize in our communities and plan for the future of the natural world, the health and well-being of our children, grandchildren and that of all people.

It is time to say no in our communities to detention centers, no to industries contaminating the places where we live and increasing global warming, no to the criminal injustice system, no to deporting our neighbors who are integral to our communities, no to manufacturing weapons, no to the slaughter of our children, no to the status quo that sustains these horrors and injustices.

It is time to come together recognizing the humanity of all of our neighbors, no exceptions, and demand a reexamination of priorities in the places where we live and set forth on a path toward a just world and a habitable planet.

(Diane St. Germain of Bedford is a board member for New Hampshire Community Rights Network.)