A worker tends to the exterior of the New Hampshire Savings Bank building in downtown Concord on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (Dana Wormald | New Hampshire Bulletin)
A block down Main Street in Concord, a mason is repairing the facade of the old New Hampshire Savings building.
I can see him from my office window, his body half hidden by scaffold netting the color of goldenrod. He’s working alone outside the top floor, the south-facing side, and as far as I can tell he’s good at his job. There’s confidence in each movement, likely the product of both repetition and faith in this piece of the process to preserve the whole. If he’s bothered by heights, he doesn’t show it.
It’s comforting, and uncommon, to see a problem and its solution so evenly matched. Gravity and exposure – time above all – create the cracks and the artisan diagnoses and heals. It is all so simple: Identify the fractures, fill in the fissures, and smooth out the lines. There is nothing simple about it: If the work is visible, that means it’s imperfect. That the structure still stands, whole and stable amid the onslaught of time, is its testament.
A romantic notion of the republic is that lawmakers are like masons, our dedicated and confident workers charged with shaping policy to address fractures and strengthen the whole. What often happens, though, is that so much time is spent arguing about the nature of the cracks and who is to blame for them – or even whether they exist at all – that the work never actually happens. Part of that is due to complexity (if you think creating a budget for a family of four is tricky try a state of 1.4 million or a nation of 330 million). But another part – and I think we can all see this – is that it’s just smarter politically to take on little (or nonexistent) cracks than the big ones affecting the common good.
That wouldn’t be so destructive if the aversion to fully tackling major issues like affordable housing, child care, and education funding wasn’t so often accompanied by a strategy of disingenuously scaring the bejesus out of the electorate.
I have a few requests in that regard. Please don’t say migrants are coming to vote illegally, murder our families, or devour our pets. Please don’t say we are in grave danger of turning into Massachusetts, whatever that means. Please don’t say our public school teachers are plotting against America by teaching its history. Please stop punching down on our transgender and LGBTQ+ citizens. Please don’t say our climate scientists or epidemiologists are lying to us to serve some darkly imagined end. Please don’t, with so many hard but solvable problems that affect everyone, try to make people see enemies and threats everywhere they look.
There are too many real cracks in need of repair. The ones closest to the foundation – racism, sexism, and economic inequality – are so deep and so old that they are sometimes mistaken for part of the design. But they are ever urgent and primary, and the responsibility of repair is not on our lawmakers alone but shared across the population. And know this: Any politician who tries to make hay by exploiting those three chasms has no interest in serving all or preserving the whole.
That is a fact, and it is self-evident.
There’s a lot to do so we will keep at it, won’t we? The repairs, I mean. Trowels rather than sledgehammers. I want new families to come to my town, and I want new affordable housing to shelter them. I want them filling up classrooms, sharing their stories and their cultures, and I want our teachers paid like executives. I don’t want the burden of that cost to buckle our aging homeowners, so let’s have a system of funding public education that is not fully reliant on property taxes. And while we’re at it, no mom or dad should lose money by going to work because of the high cost of child care, so let’s fix that, too.
That’s a lot of mortar, I know. And it’s just for starters. But some old structures are worth the care, worth the effort and time.
Good bones, as they say.