By Bob Hennelly

The other morning the quick drop in air temperature thanks to a near frost caused the loss of air in my tires requiring a stop by my local independently family owned gas station in Neptune.

In that few minutes when I was asking the owner and chief mechanic to check the air in my tires, I had one of those provocative conversations that’s being held across America as we close out the 2024 election cycle. While former President Trump and Vice President Harris’s names were never mentioned, my exchange with the male middle aged mechanic encapsulated the essence of the competing world views that both parties embody as we head to the polls in the most consequential election since the Civil War.

It boiled down to two very basic polar opposite world views, the Trump Maga perspective informed by scarcity and the all-consuming  fear that there is not enough to go around, versus Harris’s that’s rooted in abundance that requires an abiding sense of mutuality and faith in our collective capability to move forward as a nation.

Somehow the mechanic and I  got on to the discussion of college student debt relief. While I expressed support for it, the mechanic was ardently opposed to ANY student loan forbearance.

“It’s just wrong to reward those people that didn’t pay it back by paying off their loans while other people sacrificed to pay of their loans off,” he snapped resolutely.

I suggested that it might be wise to look at a bigger picture that took into account just how predatory student borrowing can be.

“Well, who know who else benefits  and shouldn’t are those colleges that charge too much in the first place,” the mechanic shot back--intimating that denying student debt relief would actually accomplish two worthy policy goals, punishing undeserving young adults with defective characters AND defunding elitist colleges.

I made the macro case that when more Americans are doing well economically, we are all uplifted.

“Well, what about all those thousands and thousands of younger adults trapped living in their parents basement who can’t start their own households, buy their first home and have children, which we need to expand the economy and ensure we can fund programs like Social Security in the future,” I suggested.

“It doesn’t matter, those people you give a second chance to will just get buried in debt again—that’s who they are,” he said.

He had worked his way around all four tires at that point.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked.

“50 cents,” he said.

I handed him a $5 bill.

Abundance.

The contours of our immigration debate fall along the similar fault lines  of fear and hate. While in Maga world, immigrants are seen as a threat to the community, in places like Springfield, Ohio, thousands of Haitian immigrants where welcomed as hard workers who had helped revive a shrinking rustbelt city.

While Trump paints immigrants as murderers and rapists, anyone who is acquainted with the reality of America’s healthcare system knows they are the backbone of our hospitals and congregant care facilities. Have you seen any news stories about that?

As we saw from Trump’s recent Madison Square Garden hate fest, where the  island of Puerto Rico was referenced as  “a floating island of garbage”, this red hot rhetoric manifests into a kind of objectification that makes it possible to call human beings vermin. After all, who lives in garbage?

Validating and feeding that fear and anger of immigrants is crucial for Trump to fuel his movement. So, as Trump did with his totally concocted story about Haitian newcomers in Ohio preying on people’s house pets, he’ll fabricate a narrative that feeds that fear and it gets validated and advanced by the social media calliope.

Consider how at MSG the former president lied and said the Biden administration and FEMA “haven’t even responded in North Carolina” in the aftermath of the massive devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene.

“There’s nobody. They don’t see any FEMA. You know why? They spent their money on bringing in illegal migrants so they didn’t have money for Georgia and North Carolina and Alabama and Tennessee and Florida and South Carolina,” Trump told the adoring MAGA crowd that lapped up what he ever he was serving. “They didn’t have any money for them. They spent all of their money on bringing in illegal immigrants and flying them in by beautiful jet planes. They flew in. We just found out about a year and a half ago. Remember, we said, what’s going on? Those planes, a lot of planes going over there. What are they? They would fly them into the middle of our country, our beautiful, beautiful country.”

There it is again, the specter of scarcity and failure when the reality on the ground in the treacherous mountains of western North Carolina was a breathtaking display of national cohesion as local  first responders came together from around the nation including from New Jersey and New York to help people who they had never met but were willing to put their life on the line to help.

It was a story of faith and abundance, an essential American story that even the so-called liberal New York news media opted to ignore entirely.

Incredibly, just days before the MAGA MSG rally, officials welcomed back 192 members of the Urban Search and Rescue New York Task Force 1 (NY-TF1) team and the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) Incident Management Team (IMT) from their deployment to North Carolina and Florida to assist with response and recovery efforts following Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

This robust response was activated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — and was locally managed by New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM) and comprised personnel from NYCEM, FDNY, and the New York City Police Department (NYPD).

As there always is, there were similar efforts launched from around the nation  that put boots and rescue dogs on the ground.

During their deployment the New York contingent searched 1,459 structures and did damage assessments for close to 5,000 rescuing people and their pets in the process.

At New York at City Hall on Oct. 25 there were no TV News cameras, no radio station microphones except mine from WBAI Pacifica to welcome these folks back. There were no other reporters asking these heroes names or asking questions about their experiences helping Americans, who after Helene and Milton had nothing in the world but the clothes on their backs.

No, what is served up instead 24-7 on our TV screen is the Trump drumbeat of fear and scarcity that lies about the generosity that’s all around us when we come together to uplift even strangers in their time of need.

Nov. 5th we will decide which America is real.

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