Time to reject hateful rhetoric and stagnant policies

At last Thursday’s candidates’ debate, I expected Peter Hoffman to use his opening statement to apologize in person to his constituents for the deplorable online comments he has made over the years—and recently--including calling Islam “a sick, backward faith practiced by low life scum” and, “a hyphenated American is not an American at all.” Contrary to some local news reports, not all these slurs were written ten years ago. He made the anti-immigrant comments as recently as 2017, during the time he was an elected official representing Chatham Borough. He has apologized in the media, but when his constituents were sitting right in front of him, nothing.

I had also hoped that his running mate Len Resto would finally stop making excuses for Hoffman and denounce the comments. I didn’t hear that, either. Instead, Resto blamed Chatham residents for the sorry state of our downtown (they all shop at Amazon, instead of locally, he said) rather than provide any forward-looking solutions, like streamlining the expensive, time-consuming, discouraging process for a store lease, as his Democratic opponents provided.

What I did hear was Hoffman in his closing statement criticize his female challengers, Carolyn Dempsey and Jocelyn Mathiesen, for focusing on what he calls “gender identity politics” because they pointed out that only 12 seats on the Borough council have EVER been held by women. The current ratio of female/male council members is 1/6, while the population of the borough is 51% women to 49% men.

Hoffman thought he could finesse his comment by pointing out that there are lots of women on the Borough’s boards and commissions, which is like saying, “We have lots of women in the kitchen doing the work, so they don’t have to be in the boardroom making the decisions.” He was audibly hissed.

I hope that Chatham Borough voters will not tolerate these kinds of behavior and attitudes in their public officials, just as I hope the federal mid-term election will be a repudiation of Trump and his unacceptable racist, violent, anti-immigrant rhetoric, which is having tragic real-life consequences. I have been told that there has been an uptick recently in bullying at Chatham Middle School, a frightening and upsetting development.

Please, let’s get our country back on track and show elected officials and their enablers at all levels that this kind of rhetoric has consequences at the ballot box. Vote for Carolyn Dempsey and Jocelyn Mathiasen, who will be outstanding role models for all our citizens, especially our children.

Ida Picker, Chatham Borough