Friday, October 16, 2026
Every afternoon, I open our mailbox and remove another small portion of a forest. Lately we’ve been receiving two to six oversized political advertisements a day, printed on sturdy cardstock and designed to survive considerably longer than the candidates they promote.
Except that most of them don’t really promote anybody.
I’ve been conducting an entirely unscientific survey of the political mail arriving at our home. With only a handful of exceptions, these advertisements don’t tell us why we should vote for someone. They tell us why we should vote against someone else.
This candidate is dangerous. That one is corrupt. He’ll raise your taxes. She’ll release criminals in your neighborhood. One’s a radical. Another can’t be trusted. There are ominous, angry photos, variously darkened and tinted red.
There are roughly 458,000 households in Nassau County. I weighed a stack of the political cards we’ve received: 15 10-by14-inch pieces weighing roughly an ounce. That doesn’t sound like much, but if every Nassau household receives just two of these advertisements a day — considerably fewer than we’ve been getting — collectively that would amount to more than 900,000 pieces of political mail every day, weighing nearly two tons.
Over six weeks, even at that conservative rate, that’s roughly 38 million pieces of political mail, weighing 80 tons. And almost all of ours make one final journey, of perhaps 30 feet, from the mailbox to the recycling bin.
There’s something bizarre about this.
Before becoming a photo of a scowling politician, paper has a complicated history. Somewhere there were trees — or recycled fibers that began as trees. There was harvesting, transportation, pulping, washing, processing and papermaking. There was lots of water. There was energy. There were chemicals involved in processing, bleaching and coating. There were huge vats of ink. There was printing and cutting and bundling.
Pallets and cartons went to postal facilities. Trucks moved them. Machines sorted them. Postal workers handled them. Mail carriers brought them to our homes. And then we recycled them.
All of this industrial activity so that someone could tell us that someone else is unfit for public office. The trees, it seems to me, got the worst of the bargain. While they were alive, they absorbed carbon dioxide. They released oxygen. They provided habitats. Their roots held soil. Their canopies intercepted rain. On hot summer days, they may even have provided pleasant places to sit.
Then we cut them down, and eventually turned some portion of them into large postcards informing us that candidates for public office are menaces to civilization.
It seems an extravagant use of resources for so little information. Trees are reduced to pulp and pulp becomes paper, which is coated, printed, cut, bundled, shipped, sorted and delivered — all to convey a political message that can usually be reduced to a few words: Be afraid of this person.
We aren’t consuming all these resources because candidates have so much to tell us about housing, education, taxes, health care, transportation, public safety and the environment that they simply can’t squeeze it all onto a website. We’re consuming them, to a remarkable degree, in the service of contempt. That may be the most toxic ingredient in the manufacturing process.
Our political culture has increasingly decided that the most effective argument for Candidate A is not that he or she possesses intelligence, judgment, integrity, experience or worthwhile ideas. It’s that Candidate B is terrifying.
Even if it works, we might ask what all this negativity costs us. Not simply in trees, gallons of water, kilowatts of electricity, ink, diesel fuel and recycling expenses. What does it cost a community to be told, day after day, election after election, that the people seeking to represent us aren’t merely wrong but dangerous, dishonest, radical, corrupt, stupid or evil?
We destroy something that took years to grow in order to manufacture something intended to make us dislike one another for a few seconds. Then we throw it away.
Tomorrow afternoon I’ll walk to the mailbox again. There will be another handful of ads waiting for me. I’ll glance at them. I’ll learn that several more people pose existential threats to Nassau County, New York state, the entire country. Then I’ll toss them in the recycling bin.
I’d rather have the trees.
Michael Blitz is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
