A hand-lettered sign was recently erected near the entrance to Hamilton, one both heartfelt and heartbreaking.

It was a plea to save Gilbert Institute after the release of an education ministry reorganisation plan that included the Paget Parish primary school among four being considered for possible closure.

The appeal ended: “Deaf people matter!” — a pointed reference to Gilbert being the only public school in Bermuda that caters to the hearing-impaired.

Gilbert allows deaf and hard-of-hearing students to enjoy an ordinary, inclusive school experience, while providing extraordinarily good programmes designed to help them better cope with their disability.

The school’s specialist services for the hearing-impaired have, of course, always been hugely consequential for those who benefit from them. But it’s probably fair to say they had been largely unknown and unheralded in the wider Bermuda community.

At least until a few days ago.

That situation has now changed because a simply-worded appeal for help was left by the roadside at Crow Lane, presumably by a concerned Gilbert Institute student or parent.

A home-made plywood sign managed to capture public attention and raise awareness of the Gilbert situation and, by extension, the entire school reorganisation initiative in a far more effective manner than any number of slickly orchestrated social-media campaigns, bombastic parliamentary speeches or noisy demonstrations ever could have.

And because the message on that little sign has resonated so strongly with the public, the community dialogue that the Government had asked for on its blueprint for school reform is now certain to be more widespread and far more candid than would otherwise have been the case.

That unobtrusive Gilbert Institute sign provides an object lesson in getting your message heard without raising your voice, hurling insults or politicising a matter that entirely transcends politics.

Whether that lesson is properly heeded remains to be seen.

Given the emergence of increasingly entrenched voting habits in recent decades, most elections in two-party political systems the world over are close to being 50-50 affairs these days. Bermuda is no exception.

Consequently, the standard political calculus here and elsewhere centres around both parties relentlessly courting the same relatively small pool of swing voters who determine election outcomes.

The party most recently defeated at the polls knows it has to appeal to the broadest possible number of “undecideds” if it is to be returned to power. It does so by consistently painting the incumbents as weak, inept and dead set on undermining the electorate’s real interests. The hope is enough of those voters who are up for grabs may be persuaded the only thing conceivably worse than the party they only recently voted out of office is the party now in office.

Conversely, the party in power knows that to retain office it must convince those same voters that its opponents are even more chronically incompetent. It must attempt to position itself as the only credible option come the next election; one perhaps not entirely beyond reproach, but still far, far better than the political wolf sitting slavering by the door.

As a result, both of Bermuda’s parties tend to be on permanent campaign footing between elections. They hope to engage swing voters on any issue — no matter how trivial or tangential — in the belief that anything that can be politicised can also quickly be turned to partisan advantage.

Bermuda’s more extreme political activists, propagandists and commentators subscribe to an absolutist position, one that essentially says the most important aspect of any issue, or non-issue, is whether it helps or hinders their party of choice.

Unfortunately, such blind adherence to party rather than principle, and such non-stop jockeying for electoral position, reinforces the truism that politics, as Henry Adams put it, is actually “the systematic organisation of hatreds” rather than a means of advancing and securing the common good.

As a consequence, we live in a political atmosphere increasingly supercharged with mutual suspicion and hostility, one in which cynicism and mercenary opportunism have been known to trump even the most fundamental humanitarian considerations.

The parties and their surrogates engage in ceaseless agitation and unending obstructionism against one another. Too often they rely on alarmism and scaremongering rather than reasoned arguments, feigning outrage at even the most patently commonsensical policy position emanating from the other side.

But if your overriding concern is that the path to the Cabinet Office involves convincing undecided voters that the other side is plotting secretly to turn us all into gay atheists or is intent on selling the Bermudian birthright for a mess of foreign investment dollars, then overheated rhetoric and an unswerving focus on side issues is what you can expect. The real interests of the majority of Bermuda residents, and the consensus-building and co-operation necessary to further them, are all too often forgotten in the continuing scramble for a few stray votes.

Faced with major parties and their backers who routinely twist every news story, economic trend, rain shower, football result — you name it — into a self-serving political narrative, is it any wonder Bermudians responded so viscerally to an unvarnished plea to help deaf children?

After all, most of us recognise deaf people do indeed matter. For that matter, most of us also recognise an entire people’s legitimate needs should never be subordinated to party political gamesmanship.