Editorial: 'Enough is enough'

When a vandal scrawled “Kill Trump” across the Morrill Street Bridge in Gilford this week, town workers covered it up within hours. Tilton business owner Angelo Farruggia, who called police after spotting the red graffiti, said it best: “Enough is enough.”

He’s right. The problem isn’t just the paint on a bridge — it’s the poison in our politics. We don’t know whether the person who did this was a political activist, a provocateur, or a teenager acting on a dare — but the words themselves reflect something we all need to confront: the casual cruelty that now passes for political expression. We are learning to hate each other, not merely to disagree.

That poison runs both ways. One side calls the other MAGA fascists; the other fires back with socialist radicals. Neither phrase describes a human being. They are words meant to divide.

We see the same thing closer to home in how we talk about homelessness. One side sees those who want encampments cleared as heartless — but the reality is that many camps are filthy, and some drug-abusers make the streets feel unsafe. The other side dismisses advocates for those experiencing homelessness as bleeding hearts who want to coddle people who should take responsibility — yet many facing housing insecurity are truly indigent, mentally ill, or trapped in cycles they can’t escape alone. Both sides are responding to real problems they see. But when we reduce each other to insults, we make it harder to find humane and practical solutions.

In our region, voters are almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. That means every day we pass each other in the grocery store, coach each other’s kids, sit side by side in church and at Town Meeting. We can’t afford to treat half of our community as the enemy.

Hateful words don’t persuade — they harden hearts. They turn the conversation into a shouting match and make compromise impossible.

The people who covered that graffiti did more than just cover profanity; they repaired, in a small way, a wound in the public square. We can all perform a similar, deeper moral action by stripping away hateful language from our own discourse — replacing contempt with restraint, empathy, and respect.

Enough really is enough.