Building on the success this summer of the checkpoints aimed at motorists who may have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol, local police would do well to take on another high-risk factor on the roads — distracted drivers.

    Backed up by additional funding and officers from the Suffolk force, several South Fork police departments joined efforts during the high season, netting dozens of suspected drunken drivers. As with a past initiative to check compliance with the state seatbelt law, the surprise checkpoints helped spread the word that even a few drinks could land a driver in a heap of trouble. Now the departments should take on cellphone users and others who daily put the rest of us at risk.

    Nearly everyone has a story about distracted drivers. It is a rare day that a commute to work or trip to school with the kids isn’t marred by some jerk’s texting, reading e-mail, or even Web surfing, putting others, and themselves, at risk. An increasing body of research shows that talking on a cellphone while behind the wheel can reduce the time it takes for drivers to react to hazards to a degree comparable to that caused by a few alcoholic drinks.

    According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, 3,092 people were killed in the United States in accidents involving a distracted driver in 2010 — about 10 percent of all highway deaths — an increased number presumably related to the use of handheld electronic devices. By comparison, the transportation administration reported, there were roughly 10,200 deaths linked to the consumption of alcohol in 2010.

    New York State has banned texting while driving along with talking on handheld phones, but it is up to local jurisdictions to get the message out. Visible and aggressive enforcement is in order; lives depend on it.

    Suffolk has not entirely ignored the problem, particularly of texting and driving. Legislator William Spencer of Huntington has been pushing a partnership with AT&T called “It Can Wait,” designed to teach young people about the risks. According to a press release this week issued by Mr. Spencer’s office, the county police is “committed” to increasing enforcement — something there needs to be much more of, if the widespread disregard for the law on East Hampton’s roads is any indication.

   About a month ago, East Hampton Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. issued a reminder to groups of bicyclists who might take to his village’s roads. Objecting to thick knots of organized recreational pedalists who fail to yield to motorists or force pedestrians to jump aside, Mr. Rickenbach reminded them that they, too, are obliged to follow traffic laws, just like the drivers of cars and trucks, “in such a manner as to prevent undue interference with the flow of traffic.”

    In a similar scenario, we wonder if the village mayor and/or officials in other jurisdictions might let our landscaping companies know that the increasing habit of blocking entire paths of travel with vehicles and trailers too large to fit into the driveways of the properties they serve will no longer be tolerated.

    How often have motorists come around a blind curve hereabouts to encounter personnel of a lawn care firm unloading mowers from a big rig stopped right in the center of the roadway without someone posted to direct traffic? The risk is real. Some years ago, a worker lost his legs in an accident just outside East Hampton Village when he was crushed by a passing vehicle against the side of a trailer parked in the road. Although under some circumstances it might be possible for drivers to wait for the road to be cleared, many times they are forced unwittingly into oncoming traffic.

    One can understand why the landscapers do it. They may be loathe to park their giant work vehicles on the very grass clients pay them handsomely to maintain. And, since the Hamptons are a bit like company towns when it comes to the wishes of seasonal residents, officials might be inclined to look the other way. Regardless of the excuses, our roads — and the police who keep them safe — are paid for by taxpayers, who have every right to use them without undue risk of collision.

   Rarely does a federal policy have as direct a potentially positive impact on the South Fork as does one put in place earlier this year by President Obama to allow some children of undocumented migrants a way to avoid deportation and work here legally. Called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, it allows immigrants 30 and younger who have lived in the United States for five or more years to apply for a Social Security number and a two-year, renewable work permit.

    So far, the number of people signing up has been less than expected; at least 1.2 million people could benefit, according to low estimates. Part of the less-than-expected enthusiasm has to do with the presidential election. Mitt Romney has said that he would “supersede” the program with one of his own. Other speculation is that some younger immigrants fear that sharing their personal information with authorities could lead to trouble for family members also here illegally. The government has gone to some lengths to dissuade that notion, insisting that personal details will remain private.

    Critics have said that the executive order to create the Deferred Action program was a political stunt to shore up the president’s support among Latino voters. This may be true to a degree, but the program is still something that some South Fork residents should seriously consider taking advantage of. Law-abiding business owners could gain as well from the program, which would broaden the pool of available workers while reducing the headaches and legal risks of using illegal labor. Tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Bridgehampton National Bank in Bridgehampton, Congressman Tim Bishop is to host an informational meeting for those interested in applying.

    In the end, deferred action is an inadequate substitute for a comprehensive and sensible national immigration reform, something President George W. Bush backed but for which he was vilified from the right. It is, however, a reasonable initial step.

   As Russell Drumm reported this week in the fishing news, the fall striped bass run has begun and fanatics from near and far are heading to Montauk Point to get in on the action. At the same time, late summer and fall can produce the best waves of the year, drawing surfers and sightseers as well to the Point, where the town is responsible for a small parking lot reached by a bumpy gravel road, from which one can quickly step onto the beach at Turtle Cove.

    By an arrangement worked out some years back, the parking lot is closed during the summer and open when the fishing and waves are good. But like any number of other public beach accesses the Town of East Hampton manages, this one is a bit of a mess — both visually and functionally — and unnecessarily so, although the fix would be simple.

    We happened to be there just this past Sunday and watched as a  town marine patrol officer reluctantly wrote ticket after ticket for vehicles that, to our eye, were not parked illegally. It turned out that, though the area in terms of space can hold perhaps a dozen vehicles, there were only legal spaces for six; three handicapped spots were clearly marked, but signs denoting the other three were unclear, if they were visible at all. No visitor — or town official for that matter — could fairly have a clue as to what was a legal spot and what was not without a map.

    So we asked the officer whose responsibility was it to clarify the confusion to put up more signs and spare well-intentioned people an expensive parking summons. The answer? The East Hampton Town Board, some of the same folks, we thought, who wanted to open up a new ocean bathing beach on Napeague. Oh, yeah. Right. Great idea. And we went about our business.

   An article in The Wall Street Journal last week pointed out parallels between the race for the presidency and that for New York’s First Congressional District. The core of its observation was that in both contests centrist incumbents are pitted against wildly wealthy challengers.

    In the First District race as in the contest for the presidency, the candidates are intelligent men with differing views on the role of government and the direction of the country. This should make for substantive exchanges. Instead, Mitt Romney’s campaign charges that President Obama has not done enough to help the economy, while the Democratic refrain is that Republican policies would destroy Medicare and the middle class. In the First Congressional District, mailboxes, radio stations, and television channels are spilling over with such assaults as Mr. Bishop’s claim that Mr. Altschuler would outsource the American work force and Mr. Altschuler’s denigrating Mr. Bishop as merely a “career politician.”

    And the campaign is getting worse in a hurry, particularly in an effort on behalf of Mr. Altschuler by an anonymously funded political action committee founded by George W. Bush and Karl Rove. According to a Politico report from last week, Crossroads GPS, a conservative political action committee that is not required to disclose its donors, is making the Bishop-Altschuler race the first of its 2012 Congressional targets. The PAC’s first salvo is a television ad repeating allegations that Mr. Bishop acted improperly in seeking fireworks permits for a constituent who was later solicited by his daughter for a campaign donation. The ad also repeatedly uses a circular graphic that appears to be the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

    The use of gun-sight imagery is worse than unfortunate, and has no place in reasonable political campaigns. While Mr. Altschuler may not have personally signed off on the ad — given the supposed firewall between Super PACs and the candidates they support — he should disavow it and demand its retraction. It seems unlikely that Crossroads GPS might have forgotten that less than two years ago Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot by a mentally disturbed man outside an Arizona supermarket and that, in the aftermath of the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee was decried for its use of gun-sight imagery in “targeting” 20 House Democrats in the previous November’s election, including Ms. Giffords.

    For a country as saturated with guns and gun violence, and whose commitment to the treatment of the mentally ill is demonstrably inadequate, the use of such images in political campaigns is wholly irresponsible. If Mr. Altschuler fails to demand that the Crossroads GPS ads putting his opponent in the line of fire be removed from circulation, one can only conclude that he is a candidate willing to say or do whatever it takes to win.

   Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but our hunch is that the police checkpoints intended to curb drunken driving this summer were a success. Word filtered out that even a couple of drinks could land someone behind bars for the night and result in fines or the loss of driving privileges for months, even on a first offense. This is good news for those who prefer safer roads, and it merits a tip of the hat for the many local officers, as well those from other departments, who put in long nights here to make this happen.

    Over Labor Day weekend, for example, Suffolk County officers helped log eight arrests on Saturday night alone in Southampton Village. East Hampton Town police had 19 D.W.I. arrests during the weekend. In mid-July, Operation Nitecap, in which state, county, town, and Sag Harbor and East Hampton Village police staffed two checkpoints, resulted in 20 arrests in an eight-hour period. Police were helped by money from a county Stop-D.W.I. fund, which helps pay for the overtime required when additional officers are called in during the long processing of most drunken driving cases.

    Unlike the usual handful of late-night stops in which an officer will spot a swerving car or broken taillight on a vehicle driven by one of the usual suspects, the checkpoints produced a wide cross-section of allegedly drunken drivers. Outrage from some, however, greeted the police effort. One person in high dudgeon even wrote to several South Fork newspapers protesting that a psychiatrist who found himself in handcuffs in July had been subjected to something “right out of Nazi Germany.” This was nonsense, of course, but it spoke to a certain sense of entitlement among some of our summer visitors.

    Having read in these pages about far too many motor vehicle accidents over the years, we know that the view that a couple of drinks can’t hurt you when you are behind the wheel is far from accurate. We applaud the law-enforcement initiative and think there should be more of them. There are still far too many drunken drivers on the roads. Efforts like these help get the message out that sometimes it is better to hand the car keys to someone else or call a cab.

   As the traditional end of the high season approaches, it is worth taking stock of how things went and whether the South Fork is on the right path.

    Think of Montauk with its jam-packed bars affecting nearby residences. Think of Indian Wells Beach that became so popular with 20-something beer bashers that some of its regulars no longer found it attractive. Think of the racket from the airport, the dread of a trip to the grocery store. Think of massive, illegal parties in rented houses whose hosts East Hampton Town officials failed to prosecute.

    Consider for a moment, if you will, that for many of us, the only tranquillity that can be found any longer between Memorial Day and Labor Day is on our own or friends’ properties — and in too many cases, not even there.

    If anything, what we have been hearing from friends and acquaintances is that this summer has been one for the books in terms of crowds, noise, traffic, and annoyances. Though we have said it before, it seems that East Hampton Town and Village and their surroundings need no more of anything in July and August — not one more bicycle, high-end shop, pricy restaurant, house, or weekend visitor.

    This might sound like anathema to those who think more is better, those whose bread is buttered by the real estate business or who own or work in businesses that are only seasonal. But there comes a time when more growth will only hurt the place. Have we hit that point? It sure seemed like it this summer.

    Money and the pursuit thereof has been ascendant this year. It need not be so, however, and a tilt back toward those who consider this place or want to make it home would be welcome.

   It is a story we dreaded. An East Hampton High School student apparently committed suicide late last week, and some of those who knew him have drawn a direct connection from what is being described as a deliberate, tragic act to his being bullied because he was gay or perceived by others as gay.

    Few details have emerged at this point about the life of David Hernandez Barros, who was 16, but we have been told fellow students at East Hampton High School bullied him. In a powerful letter to the editor of this newspaper this week, a former student at the high school said that he himself had considered committing suicide because of the self-hatred engendered by the hateful insults directed at him by his peers. David’s struggle, he wrote, was “similar to the ones many of us face growing up in this community.” If this is the status quo, it is unacceptable.

    Learning of David’s death on Saturday, Richard Burns, the superintendent of the East Hampton School District, issued a  statement calling the death tragic and saying he was truly saddened. His office and Adam Fine, the high school principal, offered counseling for students and faculty. Representatives of the Family Service League’s Joe’s Project, a suicide-prevention initiative, have been invited to speak with students. Meetings were said to be ongoing about how to respond further.

    Nationally, bullying of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender students is considered epidemic. Shocking statistics were cited in the media following the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman, who leaped into the Hudson River last year after a video was posted online showing him kissing another young man. Other recent deaths in similar circumstances have been of a 13-year-old boy in Texas, another in Minnesota, and a 15-year-old in Indiana. A majority (and far more in some surveys) of G.L.B.T. youth are said to have been the targets of bullying for who they are.

     Whether or not a detailed explanation of David’s apparent decision to end his life emerges, a shared sense is that anti-gay harassment right here in East Hampton was a cause, if not the cause. School and community leaders must address this perception — focusing on the alleged attackers, not just their victims.

    Our deepest sympathy goes to David’s family and his friends. May the community rally in their support.

   Mitt Romney seems like a nice-enough guy, which is why the secretly recorded statement in which he insulted and belittled nearly half of American voters while speaking to a group of big-dollar donors in Florida in May is shocking. At the same time, his full-throated embrace of the worst of class and ethnicity-baiting ideas — and wrong ones, to boot — could be seen as a predictable outcome of an election cycle that favors attacks rather than matters of substance.

    Mother Jones reported that the comments were made at a May 17 $50,000-a-plate fund-raiser in Boca Raton, Fla., hosted by Marc Leder, a wealthy financier. To recap them briefly, Mr. Romney said 47 percent of United States voters “pay no income tax,” are “dependent upon government,” and believe themselves “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” These Americans, Mr. Romney said, were going to vote for the Obama-Biden ticket “no matter what” and, presumably, not worth his attention. He went on to say that had his father “been born of, uh, Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot at winning this.” (The comments were heard in the recording of the event provided to the magazine.)

    The path seems direct between the Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ declaring war on the Barack Obama presidency, through the bitter primary months, to Mr. Romney’s expressing the view that almost half of Americans do not deserve his attention while some other portion vote mindlessly along ethnic lines.

        The conservative columnist David Brooks ably refuted Mr. Romney’s statement this week, writing in The New York Times that the “people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high-school degrees.” So much for, as he wrote, Mr. Romney’s imaginary division of the nation into “makers” and “moochers.”

This is not the only intemperate statement made by Mr. Romney in recent weeks. His rapid and, to many, distasteful, response to the killing of a U.S. ambassador in Libya underscores the say-anything nature of contemporary politics. In the vacuum that stands in for reasonable discourse, what Mr. Romney utters is, sadly, par for the course.

    If recent weeks indicate anything, this is not a high point for politics in this country.

   Tomorrow will be the 74th anniversary of the 1938 Hurricane, the horrific standard by which Long Island and New England storms are still measured. A show of amateur photographs taken in and around East Hampton Village in the days following Sept. 21, 1938, give a sense of the devastation — but they tell only a small part of the story and cannot be considered a prediction of what this place would look like if and when a hurricane of equal strength strikes. Hundreds of people were killed as the 1938 Hurricane raged ashore on Long Island and in coastal Connecticut and Rhode Island. Thousands of houses were destroyed. Flooding devastated parts of New Hampshire,Vermont, and Massachusetts.

    If a storm of comparable power arrived here tomorrow, the damage would be orders of magnitude greater because of the sharp, if ill-considered, increase in shoreline construction since the 1930s. Though the loss of life would be far less, thanks to improved weather forecasts, the cost to insurers, utility companies, and governments responsible for cleaning up and repairing infrastructure would be astronomical. 

    Disruption of everyday life would drag on for weeks. Then would come the debate about whether to allow property owners to return to harm’s way, rebuilding (or not) billions of dollars in lost waterfront real estate.

    Sometimes we at this newspaper feel a bit like Chicken Little, warning again and again that calamity is nigh — only in this case, the sky is actually falling; it’s just impossible to say exactly when.