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I don’t know anyone who says they’re looking forward to the politics this year. We’ve been inundated with so much negativity we’re sick and tired of it long before the campaigns really get going.

There are, however, two things which we all can do to improve our feelings about this year. They go hand in hand. The first of these is hope. We can focus on all the bad stuff shoveled endlessly through the news and assorted partisans who do their best to create fear and distrust or we can focus on what’s good.

We’ve had plenty of times in our history when the political climate was worse than it is today. Just one example, eighty-five years ago, on February 20, 1939, in Madison Square Garden, New York, 22,000 pro-Nazi supporters rallied for what they called “true Americanism”. They wrapped themselves in patriotic imagery and flanked a huge image of George Washington with swastikas. They reveled in all the old anti-Semitic slogans trying to generate hatred with long disproved conspiracy theories.

While it is true that we need to be vigilant to thwart such purveyors of hatred it does remind us that we survived that bunch of misguided zealots and we will survive the ones today.

That leads to the second way in which we all can improve the tenor of this season. It involves nothing more complex that simple logic. With the extremely rare exception of the complete fanatics among us, virtually no citizen actually wishes our country ill. No one in their right mind wants to see more violence, chaos, and discord. We all want to get on with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We might disagree with our neighbor about how best to build our society, but we certainly don’t want them to come to harm.

We can all ignore those who try to make us afraid, those who try to make us scared of threats to our well-being. It isn’t that we don’t have actual problems but, if we simply trust men and women of good will are trying to improve things we’ll quit being afraid that there’s some nefarious plot to undermine our lives.

The fear mongers don’t usually say so explicitly but they encourage us to be afraid of folks who are different. They want us to fear immigrants, particularly those who come from a different race or culture and may speak a different language

We do have a problem with waves of immigrants crossing our southern border but it’s nothing new. We used to have what was known as the Bracero Program from 1942 to 1964 in which we, of necessity, imported 5 million Mexican farm and railroad workers per year. We’ve always had migration from poorer countries it’s nothing new. We need to deal with the problems, but there’s no reason to act as if it’s some new and horrifying situation.

Trust and hope go together and each of us can foster those qualities in ourselves and those around us.