Now that Brett Kavanaugh no longer has to defend himself against Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of sexual assault, he can get on with screwing us. 

It’s been a long time coming, and were it not he it would have been someone else with equally illiberal views. It is supposed to be a liberal country, you know, inasmuch as we pay no fealty to a king (though maybe to movie and TV stars and pro athletes) or slink about whispering under the thumb of a dictator, but rather are supposed to make of ourselves a commonwealth of purposeful individuals, checking the swings the pendulum may make toward anarchy on the one hand or statism on the other. The idea, I take it, was that if power were to reside with the citizenry — with citizens sufficiently aware of the ways power could be abused — it might through the holding of frequent elections be sufficiently diffused. 

We have one such election coming soon, and let’s hope that there will be some redress, some righting of the ship, the minority party now controlling the Supreme Court as well as the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency, the latter office having become pretty much synonymous with the abuse of power. 

To help turn the tide, my wife has been knocking on a lot of doors lately on behalf of Perry Gershon, a voice of reason amidst the turmoil that seems to surround us. I told her she had met more people in the past few weeks than I had in my entire reportorial career. At least it seems that way. Of the two of us, she is more the political animal, as it were, eager to exchange ideas with others, more willing than I to listen, and to reflect, more concerned with the well-being of all, and more sensitive — even to the point of becoming physically affected — to injustices, which, of course, abound. My late mother called her “a great cheerer-upper,” and she is, genuine in her hope that in this society, in this world, we can do better by one another.

She said not to single her out, as I was about to, when her candidate won the Democratic primary here not long ago, that her contributions had been negligible, that she was just one person in a large, and well-organized, effort throughout the district. All right. I am encouraged, then, that there are many like her, that she isn’t the only one who would like to restore checks and balances to a society that has become warped. Judy D’Mello wrote recently that there are encouraging signs too among the 18 to 24-year-olds. Maybe they’ll vote in big numbers this year, availing themselves of absentee ballots.

I hope that this country will eventually live up to its promise, that it will become less stratified, more egalitarian when it comes to wealth, race, and class, and, yes, even more inspiring when it comes to according to everyone the chance to be the best they can be.

You might remember a radical reimagining of East Hampton Village that was put forward last year by a group of architects lead by Maziar Behrooz. It was called “Restoring Forward: A Vision for East Hampton Village,” and among the other revitalization ideas it proposed — which included adding walking and biking paths and greenways, and creating park space where there is now parking space in the Reutershan lot — was the creation of a cultural zone at the west end of Newtown Lane.

It occurs to me that the village already has a cultural zone — and that I live in it.

My house is behind the East Hampton Library, which is a stone’s throw from my workplace here at the Star office, which is next door to Clinton Academy (home to many fascinating exhibitions and history talks) and directly opposite Guild Hall; a few paces from Guild Hall are two museums, the growing Mulford Farm grounds and Home, Sweet Home. Soon, there will be another museum here in this hub: The old cottage behind the South End Burying Ground will open to the public as the Gardiner Mill Cottage Gallery, housing landscape paintings depicting East Hampton in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The resplendently restored Thomas Moran Studio is within walking distance, as well.

Living here in the heart of the village is a blessing. For starters, it’s handy to be able to pop home from work on the flimsiest of excuses (a need for a cookie or to pat the dog) and in any weather. And being so close to these worthy institutions is good for the mind as well as the body. I find myself trotting across Main Street to go to shows at Guild Hill constantly, from the Metropolitan Opera live broadcasts to documentary screenings during the Hamptons International Film Festival. 

People often complain that there is not enough to do here in the off-season, but I cannot agree. If anything, we have an overabundance of museum buildings sitting ready to be put to good use for the enjoyment of the public. Two of our cornerstone institutions, the East Hampton Historical Society and the East Hampton Library, do great work when they run slates of events for families at Clinton Academy and in the various meeting rooms at the library, whether it’s a talk about the “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918 or a crafting class for toddlers. 

Here’s hoping that the Moran house and the Gardiner gallery — not to mention the Hedges barn that is soon to be raised on the grounds of Mulford Farm — will throw their doors open with frequency, too, for residents of all ages to learn and have fun, even when the weather turns to snow.

There is a political divide in East Hampton but it’s not the one you might think. Instead, on lawn signs and in letters to the editor, local candidates are said to be running for the “town council.” Though the East Hampton Town Board has forever been called “town board,” “East Hampton Town Council” is becoming more common unfortunately, even though it has no basis in law or history.

White colonial government began here in 1649 with a town meeting like those called to order to this very day in Massachusetts, where most of the first Englishmen here came from. Townsmen met roughly once a month to make laws, parcel out land, deal with livestock, and settle disputes. Any freeholder who did not show up was to be fined 12 pence. The phrase “town meeting” lasted until after the American Revolution, when New York State codified a new governing structure for its towns and villages.

Poking around in the East Hampton Library’s digitized documents, I found in “Minutes of Meetings Town Board” from 1903 to 1918, the first entry in the volume, written in slanting script on April 18, 1903: “At a meeting of the Town Board this day . . . Benjamin H. Barnes was elected as Chairman of the Board for the ensuing Term.”

If The Star’s coverage over time can be said to reflect common usage, “town board” wins the popularity contest by a mile; “town council” shows up now and then over the years, but hardly ever and often in other contexts. The earliest mention of a town council here that I have been able to find was in a 1930 wire story about a Brookhaven Town councilman. In the library’s digital archive, the earliest Star reference to a town board was in January 1918 — the collection’s first searchable year — reporting the swearing-in of Justice of the Peace Hand in front of the East Hampton Town Board.

Where this town council thing comes from I don’t know. It could be that when political advisers from out of town see that a candidate is seeking a position as councilman or councilwoman they assume that means the panel itself is the council, tone deaf as that might be. 

The idea of a council also implies there is no supervisor. The supervisor is a member of the five-person town board — as precisely set out in New York State law. Or maybe eliminating the supervisor seeks to elevate the position above the rest of the board, making the post a power unto itself in the mold of our current imperial presidency, unchecked by Congress and packing the courts.

Those candidates today whose signs and advertisements state they are seeking a place on the town council clearly have not paid attention to tradition, to put it mildly. I wonder just what else they do not know about East Hampton.

I read recently a column by an 88-year-old who had discovered it was contentment that kept his peers going. What happened to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”?

Mary thinks you can be engaged, which I prefer to be, and content at the same time. Perhaps I’ve been mistaken in thinking of contentment as synonymous with self-satisfaction, a rather sedentary state to my mind.

Keep on moving is my mantra, one imparted by the late Andy Neidnig, who, all the runners here know, followed his advice as long, and as noteworthily, as he could.

And speaking of moving (and of being moved), I’m writing this week about how Michelle Del Giorno’s Rock Steady Boxing classes at her Epic Martial Arts studio in Sag Harbor are invigorating and strengthening students of hers who have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. 

One of them, Laura Stein, told me before Friday’s class that when a friend of hers had professed interest in joining the group, she’d told her, “Sorry, you have to have Parkinson’s first.”

Sensei Del Giorno keeps the energy level high during these rigorous 75-minute workouts that include repeated rhythmic shadow boxing, heavy bag work, and much footwork too. When she asked the students, one after another, what most impressed them about Rock Steady Boxing, heightened confidence, increased motivation, and the pleasure derived from coming together and cheering each other on were mentioned, as was the apparent salient fact that when it comes to ameliorating the neurodegenerative symptoms of Parkinson’s — the tremors, the problems with balance, movement, and even with speech and memory — it works.

A longtime exerciser, Stein told me “it was like getting slugged” when she learned last February that she had the disease. Soon, though, she was punching, fighting back with Del Giorno, pushing herself in new ways, coordinating her mind and body through boxing’s rapid-fire movements — engaged yet content in the company of friends.

I love the movies and saw every film I could get tickets for during the Hamptons International Film Festival last weekend, but one movie in particular left me with something of an emotional hangover. 

“I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” which was made in Romania, is a contender for this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film. In it, a young woman who is a theater director attempts to stage re-creations of the Odessa massacre of 1941, in which tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were rounded up, then shot or forced into a building that was burned to the ground. The populace looked the other way or, more to the point, took part. Above all else, the film attempts to show that ordinary citizens were complicit in horrendous wrongdoing, and perhaps to warn about the future. The film was shown here on Oct. 5. 

Two days later, The New York Times ran a story titled “God Was on Vacation” about 95-year-old Iancu Zuckerman, who grew up in a Romanian town called Iasi. There, in June 1941, “soldiers, gendarmes, and enthusiastic volunteers,” as The Times put it, rounded up several thousand Jews and then murdered many (“with guns, iron bars, or sledge hammers”) and piled the rest into freight cars to nowhere that became death trains. Mr. Zuckerman was one of 137 crammed into one car; he and only seven others escaped. 

As a child, I knew my maternal grandparents had come from a country called Romania, and I romanticized it. My mother said it was a shame that my grandmother had forgotten the language. The story goes that my grandparents lived some 49 miles from Kishinev (Chisinau), in Bessarabia (or Moldava), far enough away to survive a notorious 1903 pogrom. My grandfather arrived in this county not long afterward, in April 1906; my grandmother, with her daughter Yetta, who was to be my mother, and two small boys, arrived here that November, having hidden in hay wagons and walked from as far as the Black Sea.

Only 3,876 Jews were tallied in Moldava in 1897, but their population had grown by World War II. It was reported that from October 1941 to mid-March 1942, Romanian military and local authorities murdered 25,000 Moldavan Jews and deported 35,000 to certain death.

Regular readers will remember my previous columns about the farm my mother’s father bought, a 180-acre farm in dairy country in the Catskills, where we spent bucolic summers. On fertile ground in Bessarabia, the family had been what could be called middle class. They cultivated grapes and danced on them to make wine. Their life was good. The war notwithstanding — or perhaps because of it — my grandfather was trying to re-create in the Catskills what had been good about the homeland, and to share it.

A close friend called on Tuesday to say he had been in the hospital emergency room overnight for treatment for an allergic reaction to meat.

Time was no one much knew about the now-dreaded alpha-gal allergy, much less that it was brought on by the bite of the lone star tick. As far I know, I was patient zero, at least in the New York area. My first attack came in about 1991, a couple of hours after eating pepperoni pizza while helping to install an interactive exhibit for children at the South Street Seaport Museum.

One thing about anaphylactic shock is that it makes you very dumb. At least that happened to me. After the pepperoni stepped up and kicked me, I walked to a pharmacy, took a fistful of mind-numbing antihistamines, and got in my truck, headed for the Long Island Expressway. To this day, I can’t pass a certain stretch of houses on the service road at about Exit 21 without flinching. I will spare you about what was along the side of the road before I fell asleep in the front seat. As I said, it makes you dumb.

After a few more attacks, I found a well-recommended allergist in Manhattan. It took several rounds of tests and a detailed food diary before the meat allergy became clear; she had never seen it in any of her patients. I even got on some national network or other’s morning show, in a segment about people with weird allergies.

These days, alpha gal is old news. Pretty much every restaurant server here knows about it. This is a relief because for years I had the suspicion that I was being seen as a food nut when I asked that extra care be taken with what I was about to be served.

Probably my worst allergic reaction came when I was a co-moderator for a debate between Representative Tim Bishop and Lee Zeldin at Westhampton Beach High School. Joe Shaw, the Southampton Press editor, and I had met for dinner earlier that night at Starr Boggs; I had the fish. Thing was, the brownish sauce my fillet was swimming in was made with meat stock. 

About halfway through the debate I felt a telltale itching at the back of my head. Then my lips started to tingle. As the closing statements began, I leaned over to Joe and whispered that I had a, uh, medical situation and would have to run out the minute they ended.

All was good as I darted up the aisle and asked a cop through thickening lips if there was a 24-hour pharmacy nearby. He gave me directions, and I took one step toward the parking lot. Suddenly, Mr. Bishop blocked my path, looking to make one final point. I stood there wondering what to do. At last, he was done.

A couple of antihistamines later, I was headed home in the truck. “What else could I do?” I thought. I was lucky to have made it home. Like I said, it makes you dumb. 

By the way, the last time I wrote about ticks, the good people at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital sent over a nice tick kit with an identification card, tweezers, a magnifying glass, and alcohol swabs, as well as advice about how to remove the little terrors. The kits are available at programs run by the hospital’s tick-borne disease resource center and can be requested at 631-726-TICK. They are worth having on hand.

When a woman with whom we were talking one night at Cittanuova said she had never felt she was any better or any less than anyone else, I said, “That’s it.”

That, I thought, is the way to be, or the way to want to be, certainly in an ideal democratic society — open to others, unshackled by fear or envy or pride, willing to engage on equal terms with anyone, to listen to and reflect upon what everyone has to say. 

We seem far removed from that sensibility now, the even-tempered give-and-take that can lead to progress, stuck in a rut of contumely, rashness, and self-aggrandizement, to the exclusion of all. Fear rules, sowing hatred and discord as through heedlessness an egalitarian society and nature suffer.

There are, of course, exceptions, and one I’m thinking of is close to home: I-Tri’s work with teenage girls, who, once they’ve trained for and participated in a triathlon, a daunting task, even for the athletic, and have come to know and appreciate themselves and their teammates better through interactive esteem-building sessions, realize — their fears having been overcome — that they can do anything.

Overcoming fear, I-Tri’s founder, Theresa Roden, has said, “sets us apart.” Indeed, it was for this, she thinks, that the International Triathlon Union’s women’s committee recently singled I-Tri out for an award. And, come to think of it, there are no tryouts for I-Tri: Anyone, everyone is welcome. 

We celebrate individuality in this country, and also, if our ideals are to be heeded, community. Individuality and community. Ideally, we’re a team, like I-Tri, each working to maximize her or his gifts, and all working as best we can to make of many one. Lofty goals, yes. But achievable if, at the end of the day, we are all in this together.

Ms. Roden wants to take this farther than the East End — into the country, into the world. And, as David Wilmott used to say at the end of his editorials, why not? It is a lesson well worth the learning.

Isabel, with whom I work — a terrific long-distance runner, by the way — said on reading the story I’d written on I-Tri last week, that that was it, just as I’d said when the woman in Cittanuova spoke. I never felt any better or any less than anyone else. And, might it be true, that the better you feel about yourself, the more inclined you may be to celebrate others, your teammates, even to the extent, as is the case with I-Tri, of running back a half-mile after you’ve broken the tape to run with the last one to finish, hand-in-hand, across the line. If I-Tri were adopted throughout this country, think what we could do.

You know what they look like. You have passed through them countless times, mostly in the middle but sometimes side by side with another car, holding your breath and your car’s breath hoping you get through unscathed. 

They are the railroad underpasses.

What East Ender has not encountered that wacky underpass on Narrow Lane in Bridgehampton that basically makes a dogleg left turn while going under a low trestle? You know the one. Oh, you avoid it? As well you should. What engineer came up with that particular design? Maybe the same one that made the overpasses out here so steep and narrow that you take your life in your hands on Cranberry Hole Road or near the Wolffer Estate winery. 

But the craziest of the crazy out here are the more frequently used underpasses that I pass through pretty regularly to get from place to place — the ones that peel off the tops of trucks, the ones that are not set in a straight line on the road bed, the ones that often get puddles under them, those crazy low and crooked things that are lined with rough, pointy rocks that face the road and ruin cars.

Who ever thought it was a good idea to have car-killing pointy rocks in a tight underpass. 

Consider the Midtown Tunnel — clad in subway tile, bright, relatively well maintained. Now consider the underpass on Stephen Hand’s Path in East Hampton. It’s dark, it’s on an angle, and it has sharp rocks sticking out, ready to snag a car or truck that has the misfortune to have to share the road with an oncoming vehicle. Not everyone knows to drive in the center of an underpass, and not everyone who wants to actually can when another car enters at the same time. Sometime you get a scrape. But why?

I came to wonder about this after the whole length of the right side of my new (to me) car got scraped on some very hostile rocks projecting from the inside of the underpass on Stephen Hand’s Path. Yes, another car and mine were sharing the road bed, and yes we probably should have “after-you-ed,” but we didn’t, and my car got scraped to the bone. There is a rock, pointy like a shark fin, at exactly the spot where my ex-side mirror was.

All of the underpasses could be smooth. All of those rocks are full of car and truck paint from years of minor and major scrapes. Why not fix them? Why not smooth them down? Why not clad the sides of these trestles with some kind of heavy-duty rubber matting? Why not take a construction crew, community service gang, or maybe just some citizens with big hammers and chisels and knock off all the pointy bits that scrape unlucky cars? Why not rubber baby buggy bumpers?

I wonder if, when they raise the tracks on North Main Street in East Hampton, they will keep those rough and pointy rocks on the inside of the new underpass. Time will tell, but this is the time to rethink all of the underpasses and make them more user-friendly. Just soften the sides. Please. Pretty please. 

I call my experience — car versus pointy rocks — a close encounter of the word kind. When I came out from under the trestle, having heard the miserable sound of scrape and seeing what the pointy rocks had done, I actually swore so long and loud that had you been in the neighborhood you would have heard some pretty exotic combinations of cusswords. 

You may have had one of those scrapes, and if you haven’t, you probably know someone who has or has had a close call. All the body shops out here just ask which trestle, and commiserate about the pointy rocks that do the damage.

The word “community” came to life under sunny skies on Sunday afternoon at the East Hampton Historical Farm Museum, where a large party of locals gathered around outdoor tables for a turkey dinner that included everything you could ask for: scalloped potatoes, corn on the cob, baked beans, and an eight-foot-long table groaning under a score of home-baked pies. The meal cost $10 (or the donation of one of the aforementioned pies) per person.

This week’s “Mast-Head” column, below, is about the same event, from a different perspective, but I wanted to focus on the historical objects that are now part of the museum — and on Prudence Carabine, the person who gathered them and who gathered all of us together.

Ms. Carabine’s credentials as an East Hampton political and civic activist are unbeatable. On Sunday, she served as what might be called the master of ceremonies, wearing a cowboy hat that had once belonged to Fanny Gardiner as she plunged into the audience with a cordless microphone to gather stories about the late Bonackers the annual event was dedicated to this year.

The farm museum, if you don’t know it, sits at the intersection of Cedar and North Main Streets, opposite the Emergency Services Building. The barn there is full of 19th-century tools and wagons, even an antique tractor. Much of the equipment came from a now-gone Tillinghast family barn (a few pieces even came from our barn behind the Star office, which we cleared out before it was carted away for restoration by the East Hampton Historical Society). A flower garden at the back of the spread is maintained in memory of the late Matthew Lester, who died as a young man after planning the garden as part of an effort to save endangered honeybees.

The Revolutionary-era farmhouse was built by Capt. Jonathan Barnes of Amagansett and sold to Selah Lester, who moved it to the site. At the time the parcel was acquired by East Hampton Town, it had been used as a private residence. With Ms. Carabine leading the charge, the committee that set about restoring the interiors of the house decided to set it up to reflect the early 1900s, and so it features a double porcelain kitchen sink and wood cookstove. The furnishings are true to the period and can almost tell a story of their own. Ms. Carabine explained that the committee chose to focus on the early 1900s because the period was the “stepping off point” for the new century but “still had enough flavor of the Civil War — and the 1800s.” It is a charming place, evoking a simplicity that many of us yearn for in these days when we feel overburdened with possessions, with simply too much stuff.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the turkey dinner transported us back to another, more kindly century, but it was a heartwarming few hours to be there among friends and old families, those who remember when everyone in town knew one another, and — though it isn’t easy to keep a foothold here as the cost of living skyrockets and skyrockets again — are holding fast and staying put.

If you are looking for a break from the bustle of the film festival this weekend, one of the more untrammeled options is the modest farm museum on North Main Street in East Hampton.

The museum is in an old farmhouse and focuses on ordinary life from the 1880s to the 1930s, a period of peace, war, growth, and rapid change. The last quarter of the 19th century brought artists to East Hampton; Winslow Homer made a pioneering visit in 1874. The rakish members of the Tile Club arrived in the summer of 1878, among them William Merritt Chase, Homer, John Twachtman, Stanford White, Alden Weir, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The East Hampton Star printed its first edition in December 1885. Train travel from New York City to East Hampton began 10 years later, in part to serve a burgeoning summer colony up by the beach.

But the farm museum is less concerned with these milestones than in the anonymous lives of the town’s ordinary residents. It was with pleasure that I accepted an open-ended offer from its organizers to speak on Sunday during a community turkey dinner. 

My thought was to speak about the value of history and to say that the past is not only important on its own but for what it says about the present. East Hampton has long been going around in what I think of as a history cul-de-sac, obsessing over the leading families, the ones that got here in the 17th century. But that leaves out a lot.

Three hundred and seventy years ago, when the first English colonists came across the Sound from Connecticut to establish this beachhead, the last names were nine in all: Barnes, Bond, Hand, Howe, Mulford, Rose, Stratton, Talmadge, and Thomson. 

Recollections of a number of their descendants have faded. But some have not, and for those of us who have ties to the old families, things get complicated pretty quick trying to figure out the genealogies. When I was at East Hampton High School the joke was that those of us who went way back would call each other “Cuz,” as in cousin — and we probably were if you looked back far enough. In middle school and later, I went out on dates with a distant relative. It was no big deal, even if the kids from away gave us grief about it.

Of course, those early colonists worked hard and were part of the foundation of the American experiment, but they were just part of the story. The muscle and sweat that built East Hampton and the New England colonies, what would one day be the United States, was not just this handful of “upstreet” folks. There were native people, people of African descent, and scores of families that moved here for one reason or another. 

The last names were Bennett and Lester, Halsey, Dominy, Field, Filer,  Gann, Hicks, King, Loper, Payne, Schellinger. There were Sherrills, Strongs, Tillinghasts, Vails, and Van Scoys. There were the Pharaohs, Cuffees, Fowlers, and Lynches, Cards, Iaconos, DiGates, Bistrians, Motts, Andersons, Schencks, Bahnses, Pittses, Eckers, Duryeas, Joneses, Hayeses, and Carters, and on and on.

History is a lot more than just stories about the leading men. And that is what I think the farm museum is so good at — pointing out that everyone in his or her own way contributed to what East Hampton is today. And that this is a story that keeps writing itself.