It snowed a real snow. Thank goodness. Maybe winter will be like winter again. The year confused — barely any plowable snow last winter; deluges of spring rain; severe drought summer into fall with unnerving fire risk. Seeing the snow decorating the landscape at Thanksgiving and a good covering last week was almost comforting.

But don’t be too quick. Things are not what they seem. 2023 was the hottest year in human history and all indications are that 2024 will be even hotter despite the more familiar temperatures here in the Valley recently. The snow cover is simply disguising, momentarily, the harsh reality.

Our national politics are also not what they seem. The “mandate” our president-elect claims is nothing like a one-sided victory. The election was decided by only 63% of eligible voters. The winning candidate did not win 50% of the votes cast. 2.3 million votes separated the two candidates – 1.5% or the third narrowest win in 136 years of our history. The “landslide” was decided by 238,000 votes in three swing states, or about 79,000 votes per state. That’s less than 10% of the population of four western Massachusetts counties.

The win is a reality, but so is the fact that there is no super majority. Those discouraged by the win should remember how many people, like themselves, chose a different vision for our country. The “loyal opposition”— those who still believe in the Constitution — is large.

As we learn that the election “mandate” is not what it appears, the veil is also being lifted from the well-covered face of the campaign. Webster’s dictionary defines “populism” as “A political philosophy or movement that represents or is claimed to represent the interests of ordinary people, especially against the Establishment.” Touted as a populist, the incoming president has been nominating billionaire after billionaire to key positions. These are hardly people who understand the lives of regular people. Our country’s 800 billionaires (that’s .0000023% of our total population) hold more wealth than the lower 50% of families. Extreme wealth should not qualify someone for managing our country’s resources, certainly not for telling others how to use their money. This myth has dogged our nation’s history and was reinforced effectively by Reagan’s intentional disparagement of government as a means of helping ordinary people live safe, healthy, fulfilling lives.

As each billionaire is nominated, their intentions become clear: Dismantle public education; cut and privatize Medicare; reduce Social Security (our own money, by the way, saved up year after year); eliminate health care insurance support; allow pharmaceutical companies to roll back recent price cuts for life-saving medications. Also planned: reduce pollution standards so corporations can foul our air and water without cost. There’s talk about reducing availability of vaccines for killer diseases like measles, polio, covid and many more. The idea is “let business be business,” whether business threatens our health, our livelihoods or our lives with their stampede to gobble up more national and international wealth. The ”populist” agenda is not what it seemed on the campaign trail, rather a plan to reduce the rules and constraints that protect everyone.

Here are some examples of the impact of these ideas. 41.9 million people use food stamps — 12% of the total population in 2023, people who only have $2,313 monthly income (40% of users are white; 27% are Black; and 22.7% are Hispanic).

Forty-seven million people use Affordable Care Act health insurance; the uninsured rate is at an all-time low. Sixty-five million are enrolled in Medicare (18.7% of the population). Privatization of these programs raises costs as recent studies have shown; if eliminated, millions will suffer.

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Social Security serves 67.5 million people (nine of 10 people 65 or older, 20% of total population).

Recent meetings among congressional Republicans, agency nominees and their advisors indicated that “everything is on the table,” including Social Security and Medicare.

These statistics mean nothing unless you realize the person benefitting is your mother, your grandfather, your neighbor, your friend. Eliminating these public supports hurts us all, some drastically. “Efficiency” is not what it seems if the calculations exclude the community and human costs.

An unregulated world is a pipe-dream. We all suffer from the greed and dishonesty of oil companies that damage our earth’s life-giving systems; or pharmaceutical companies allowed to profit off addiction to overprescribed opioids, among many other examples.

Winter is not what it seems anymore. The solstice is nigh; what does increased light reveal? How will we respond?

Judy Wagner lives in Northfield.