PEER, Progressive East End Reformers, has seized the attention of liberals on the East End with its strongly stated intention to confront issues of economic inequality and the excessive power of the financial industry in the Democratic Party that were underscored by the Sanders campaign and Clinton defeat. Attendance at its meetings has zoomed from 12 to 90 between PEER’s first meeting in November and its third in February.

With the rising dominance of radical conservatism in Washington, D.C., and a majority of the states, we need groups like PEER on the national scene. With the East Hampton Democratic Party’s resistance to meaningful expansion of affordable housing and enforcement of state and town disabilities laws, we need them locally. PEER’s declaration to be truly inclusive of our population here is welcome and essential.

So it is with respect that I ask PEER the following questions.

Are local African-Americans attending PEER meetings in significant numbers? I gather from the meeting I attended and from friends present at its earlier meetings that very few have. Were serious attempts made to reach out to the predominantly black churches on the East End?

Has PEER sought to enlist economically stressed Hamptons residents who must live from paycheck to paycheck and require a Target or Walmart-type store, even a moderately sized one, on the South Fork? Their case: Prices in East Hampton are much too high; traveling the 60 miles to and from Riverhead to shop at reasonable prices devours income-producing time and is expensive in itself. (For comment by an affected East Hampton resident on the pro-Walmart/Target viewpoint, see “The East Hampton Divide,” a “Guestwords” in the Feb. 26, 2015, Star.)

Has PEER reached out to the clients, agencies, and advocates for adults and children with developmental disabilities? They, especially, will be ravaged if Medicaid or Medicare funding is cut.

Has there been an energetic outreach to students and faculty of Suffolk Community College? To a great extent, this is Trump territory, containing many military veterans and others who hear little of Sanders’s proposals.

What provisions are made for people with physical disabilities to attend and fully participate in PEER’s meetings, decision-making, and other activities? As a person who must use a walker, has a severe hearing loss, and was for 10 years East Hampton Town advocate for people with disabilities, I feel especially connected to this issue.

I am told by attendees of the January meeting that there were no access provisions available, that the meeting was held in a place that was not wheelchair-accessible and was otherwise very difficult for mobility-impaired people to approach and negotiate. At that meeting and the ensuing PEER meeting in February in the meeting room of the Bridgehampton National Bank in Bridgehampton, there was no FM or infrared assistive-listening device, which is required by the Americans With Disabilities Act and essential for me and others with hearing losses to stay apace of and participate in the proceedings. Nor was there as far as I could find an offer of a sign interpreter for people who are deaf.

These are startling omissions by a group that emphasizes a commitment to inclusiveness and to emulating the successful grass-roots organizing methods employed by the Tea Party.

Is PEER’s “grass-roots” approach seriously on its to-do list, or just a nice touch of branding? There are some 2,000 year-round residents with mobility and auditory disabilities on the South Fork.

Surely, PEER has a tougher row to hoe than the Tea Party, which was organized around a unity of resentment at Obama and bicoastal and academic elites. The Tea Party also enjoyed abundant financial support from conservative donors.

PEER’s destiny will depend on its success in guiding disparate East End groups in a common, progressive direction — the Anglo and Latino workers and school parents, our pretty-little-town conservationists and our Walmart-demanding domestic workers.

I’d sure love to see them pull it off. I assume no Koch brothers or Mar-a-Largo steak diners are PEER contributors, but I have a hunch there is enough financial comfort among its members to hire a few organizers to go out there and harvest those grass roots.

Let’s hope so.

Richard Rosenthal’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, and The London Sunday Telegraph. PEER will meet on March 9 at 6:30 p.m. at Bridgehampton National Bank in Bridgehampton.

I am sitting on a conference call with the special-collections people from Hofstra University and Barnard, speaking of how we might highlight two decades of writing from some of Long Island’s most silenced and isolated communities, as a resource for activists, scholars, and students grappling with the living history of this long island of ours. As we speak of noncustodial and digital archive models, I remember those days in the Morgan Library, studying the original manuscripts of the already acknowledged “great” writers whose works had become the canon for the striving and the young.

Could a literature of unheard voices become its own kind of canon? What would happen if those voices were to be truly heard?

My mind wanders back to the dream that led me to open the doors of the Southampton Cultural Center to a small group of women wishing to write their memoirs but not yet knowing how they might begin. I had offered a week of free workshops following a conference I had co-organized celebrating women breaking silences. 

Up until that time, whether I had taught writing in the university or at home, I had assumed that there was a certain consistency that people needed to count on as they were opening themselves up on the page. By the time I had second thoughts as to what it would mean to craft intimate stories in a situation where strangers might come in at any moment, it was too late to take back my offer. The publicity was out, and people had already signed up.

I decided to make the most of what I thought was a bad situation by inventing the notion of writing for a reading stranger who might walk in at any “page one moment” of each person’s life. I told the circle of women that the stranger wouldn’t intrinsically care about the dreams and sorrows, injustices and gifts that make up a life. 

“How then could you come up with a scene that would fast-forward your imaginary ‘stranger/reader’ into walking in your shoes?” I asked. Then we all got to work, playacting the scenes out of each woman’s life that began to tell her story, trying each one on for size, seeing what produced the greatest empathy and engagement. 

I wasn’t prepared for the power of the stories that people who hadn’t written before were able to create. Within two or three days, I could tell that these opening moments were far more consistently compelling and strategically shaped than anything my students in closed workshops had been able to produce. 

But something else was happening as well. Already the women had formed a community that broke through those barriers that keep us from hearing one another. They were rearranging child care, taking sick days at work, and making other adjustments so as not to miss even one of the five days. They were staying up all night writing. 

On the third day, I sat bolt upright at 5 a.m. and said to myself that I had happened upon an interesting pedagogical notion, that someday I would pursue it and see if it could be funded. As I made my morning coffee, I could not stop thinking about the private-public nature of this odd amalgam I had chanced upon — part speakout in search of the stories most needing to be told, part throwback to the consciousness-raising of the 1970s, but with something else added, through the making of a product that was meant to be publicly heard. Why it worked, against all intuition, was something to be pondered and explored. 

On the fifth day, which was to be the culmination of the workshop, I realized that I didn’t care whether it would be funded. I asked the Town of Southampton for the use of the cultural center one evening and one morning a week. And Herstory Writers Workshop was born.

Never could I have dreamt that I would spend the next 20 years building a network of writing circles engaging thousands of women and girls (and more recently men and boys) in domestic violence shelters, universities, labor halls, public schools, and healing centers, nor that the words “stranger/reader” and “imaginary page one” would be echoing in Spanish and behind prison walls.

As the weeks turned into months, and eventually years, we continued to alternate our meetings between daytimes and evenings to accommodate working women as well as mothers and grandmothers with young children at home. Some came to every meeting, working on book-length projects that would take years to complete. Others came just long and frequently enough to write a particular story that needed to be told. There were always new strangers. There were houseguests and visiting cousins who would come simply to listen or to offer support, but soon they, too, were beginning to tell their own stories.

After a while, the project, which had begun as a bit of an experiment as to why such a public-private thing should work so well, took on a life that came to feel more permanent. Women were coming from so far away that we were invited to open another branch in a more central part of Long Island — in a community and counseling center whose teddy bears and boxes of tissues, bright sunflowers and freely wandering animals would sharply contrast with the guns in cases and displayed war helmets of the Southampton Veterans Hall. 

And then there was another invitation, and another, from the Greater Port Jefferson Arts Council, from Friends World College, from a union of day laborers, as together we developed our tool kit to help our stranger/readers care. 

Teachers, human-rights activists, and healers took notice of the power of a pedagogy based on the dare to care. There was talk of replication and the creation of a manual to train new facilitators. The first two trainees asked to work in the jails, where the silencing was the greatest. A third founded our first Spanish workshop here on the East End, where women who worked as housecleaners, nannies, and cooks, many of them scholars or judges in their own countries, could write in the language of their memories and dreams. 

We published two bilingual magazines, along with a prison collection, then six other books, including two full-length anthologies used as textbooks by our college partners to help their students give the issues they studied a face. We received many invitations for our writers to give public readings. 

I will never forget the day when our favorite lieutenant called to purchase 250 books to train incoming officers in Suffolk County’s correctional academy. For 18 months, no officer was allowed to graduate without reading the stories of the women he or she would someday guard. 

We began to work in the schools, taking students with stories of growing up in poverty, racism, violence against immigrants, teen pregnancy, and early incarceration to write with college students on their campuses. Today it is our largest program, with eight school districts and five colleges involved.

And then, five years ago we created a new position for a justice and advocacy director, who just became our executive director, while I let go of the administrative journey to return my 70 hours a week to the literary work that set me on a course larger than I could have imagined. 

As I drive the long miles from my house in Sag Harbor to the campus of Hofstra University, the home of our new training institute in partnership with Hofstra’s Center for Civic Engagement, I look down at the copies of our manual “Paper Stranger” that I will be distributing to our cohort preparing to work in the field. And I think about how in this moment of history, when those coming into power are sanctioning hatred of the stranger, how doubly important are the stories that come from populations kept silenced, estranged, and apart.

I think about the notion of passing along the dare to care — how simple it is. And yet how profound are the ramifications as we move out of silence into speech. For when we care deeply enough, we find words we didn’t know we had. Each of us has a poetry of experience hidden deep inside us that can be called into being out of the stream of memories that bubble up to the surface from our hope and our anger and our grief. When we dare to imagine that someone might hear us and actually care, bit by bit we break out of the silence and isolation that is the fate of so many.

But what is caring, really? It is so much more than a feeling passed along to another, going nowhere. It is — and must always be — a very deep call to action. Otherwise our belief in society’s capacity to protect us will die even before it is properly born.

Yet this is the time when our stories are needed the most.

Erika Duncan is the author of the novels “A Wreath of Pale White Roses” and “Those Giants: Let Them Rise.” Her monthly “Encounters” series ran in the Long Island Weekly section of The New York Times for four years in the 1990s.

Scientists are after the truth. In my field (immunology), as in every other field of science, the goal is to make “discoveries.” These are about the truths relevant to the world and the universe we live in. Discoveries may also pertain to our bodies and minds: how they function or malfunction in disease.

It is worthwhile examining how the process of reporting discoveries works. For 12 years I was an editor of a prestigious medical journal with a focus on immunology (The Journal of Experimental Medicine, published by Rockefeller University Press). As is usual for every science publication, manuscripts are submitted, then vetted by the editors, and then often sent out to be reviewed by specialists. The latter are sometimes competitors of the authors. The process is rigorous. As an editor I spent one hour a day reading submitted scientific papers and preparing written and oral arguments about whether they should be published at all, and whether revisions were required. 

Editors take on this unpaid job because of the prestige among colleagues and perhaps in the hope that such a position may help their academic careers. For authors, the process is often vexing and frustrating. But, at its core, the process is healthy. With each resubmission a scientific manuscript is improved, claims are more carefully presented, and, often, new data are added to support the conclusions.

Editors of newspapers have a different and more difficult job. They often get to choose their cadre of reporters, they can choose or invite op-eds, and they can choose the letters to the editor they wish to publish. For some newspapers, the competition is fierce (only 5 percent of submitted letters are published by The New York Times). Other newspapers, like The East Hampton Star, publish all submitted letters as a matter of policy. But even then, there is some editorial oversight, for slander, for libel, for copyright infringement, etc. Editors are most often not specialists when evaluating submitted work. Given the time constraints, they don’t send submitted writings out for review, but rather use their in-house staff, if facts need to be checked.

One has to wonder, however, whether all of this is increasingly irrelevant. The trend worldwide is for readers to get their news from the internet and mostly from unvetted and unedited sites. That includes social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and sites that peddle fake news stories. 

The latter are particularly dangerous. There are now many examples of young entrepreneurs who dreamed up fake stories and made money. Some examples were provided in an article written by Andrew Higgins, Mike McIntire, and Gabriel J.X. Dance, “Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income,’ ” which appeared in The New York Times on Nov. 25. The money that these entrepreneurs are after likely comes from advertisers. The greater the number of clicks on your story, the greater the money.

There have been calls for Facebook and Twitter to edit their sites more carefully. With Twitter hosting nightly tweets from POTUS promoting dubious stories from Breitbart, the issue is whether this could even represent a national security risk.

On March 5, Beau Willimon, the creator of the TV series “House of Cards,” tweeted the following: “Today’s tantrum is just the latest example of why @realDonaldTrump & @POTUS must be removed from @Twitter.”

Is it reasonable to ask that the owners of companies like Twitter and Facebook become editors or employ an army of editors? Perhaps this is a short-term bandage, but it sounds like an overwhelming task.

The better solution is a long-term one. We need to educate our children, at home and in our schools, how to vet information, how to use fact-check sites such as snopes.com, how to look for confirmatory reports, and how to have a high degree of skepticism. Critical thinking should be part of every curriculum. If you are on a school board make a suggestion. Happily, many educators are aware of this need, and some schools (like the Springs School) have offered courses on internet literacy, vetting sources, and the like.

Young minds should be warned about looking for “news” that confirms your own bias. They should be encouraged to have an open mind and engage in open-minded discussions with classmates. That’s what scientists do with their colleagues. 

David Posnett, M.D., is emeritus professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan. He lives in Springs.

I am one of those single, childless people who exhaust all their maternal or paternal instincts on their dogs. Scratch that, they are not even my dogs.

I can explain, but first: Sugar is a kind, 65-pound brown dog who is perpetually smiling and looks like she is wearing mascara. I like to think she is a chow-golden mix, but she is probably “just a mutt,” as a random woman at the Springs Dog Park once insensitively pronounced in clear hearing range of Sugar, who, like most rescues, can be self-conscious to begin with. 

Sugar belongs to my old landlord. Penny, a 2-year-old boxer mix with nice white socks, is owned by my old landlord’s neighbor. They are both loved and well-cared-for dogs. The owners are appreciative of the added exercise the dogs get when I come by for our constitutional, but we all know they’re doing me a favor, as the dogs are complete antidepressants. Seeing them run around in the great resource that is the Springs Dog Park gives me unmitigated joy every time we go. 

And we go: I have been taking Sugar to the dog park, rain, snow, or shine, often twice a day, for four years now, and Penny for close to two years. I am lazy by nature and would not do it if it were an inconvenience.

I am not alone. East Hampton loves its rescues. The Springs Dog Park is full of happy people whose lives have been augmented by dogs, a lot of them mutts. It appears to me that a majority of the dogs there are rescues, and many seem to have barely escaped kill shelters, so it is a mutual appreciation, dogs and owners alike happy for the new lease on life.

The dogs are from all over, but most seem to come from down South. They don’t just appear, as we know, most of them come from established rescue organizations like the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons and the Southampton Animal Shelter, where staff members work tirelessly to vet them, get them meds and shots, and find them good homes.

When I was walking one morning I found out that there is another worthy rescue organization out here run by locals. It has been flying under the radar and now needs help. 

Save a Dog a Day was started in December 2007 when Colleen Fennell, an almost ridiculously likable woman who worked in the East Hampton School District for 25 years (and graduated from East Hampton High School in 1971), became aware of the disturbing realities of animal shelters in the South. In the United States as a whole, she learned, more than four million healthy animals are killed each year. Other than lethal injection (which is the most humane method used to euthanize them), many shelters continue to gas them or administer a heart stick, which is not only extremely painful but also illegal.

Part of Colleen’s challenge is to eradicate these cruel practices while maintaining a working relationship with the shelters. Using the internet, she began to share information about dogs that were within days of being euthanized, trying to find people willing either to temporarily care for them or permanently adopt them as their own. Colleen teamed up with like-minded individuals and started rescuing dogs, with a goal of saving at least a dog a day. She soon had more than 50 volunteers and became an official 501(c)(3) tax-deductible charity.

Colleen wants to raise awareness about shelter issues and the grotesque euthanasia of so many discarded dogs. Volunteers donate their time, energy, money, and homes to this cause and spend endless hours rescuing at-risk dogs and aiding in their removal from shelters. They advertise dogs on the internet and in newspapers and put up posters. Many volunteers have been known to nurse dogs back to health, bathe and groom them, and even buy and deliver dog food to families that adopt them.

“Our volunteers will jump in the car at a moment’s notice to rescue a dog that only has one day to live,” Colleen said. “We arrange for free transportation, moving the dogs from shelters to homes and adoptive families. As a last resort, when volunteer transports are not available, we utilize commercial animal transport services. However, 95 percent of our transportation is donated. It requires volunteers to drive or fly hundreds of miles uncompensated in what resembles an Underground Railroad for rescued animals.”

They also use Pilots ’n’ Paws, an organization of pilots who donate their time and planes.

Serendipitously, I occasionally produce small comedy shows for nonprofit organizations. I know a comic named Joey Kola (he used to be Martha Stewart’s sidekick), who, among a lot of other material, does a ton of dog and cat jokes, and so I asked Colleen if she wanted to try to do a show. I called Joey, who lives in Suffolk, and we’re on for April 15 at 8 p.m. at 230 Elm Street in Southampton, all the proceeds going to keeping Colleen and friends doing what they do: getting sweet, healthy dogs out here to better our lives.

Jeff Nichols lives in Montauk. His latest book is “My Life (Direct to DVD): How to Sell Your Self-Published Book to Hollywood, and Other Disaster Stories.”

Six neighbors were sitting in a circle when idle chatter began to edge into a discussion of hot-topic social issues — health care, budget proposals, public education, housing, employment, and the environment, just to name a few. Speaking quietly at first, the sharing became more animated, words spoken with increasing vigor and persuasiveness. And volume. Faces hardened and fists clenched, bodies thrusting forward. 

Differences of opinion, some significant, morphed from exchange into confrontation. Two, then three began speaking at the same time, competing for attention. 

Our surprise and concern about this escalation did not change the dynamics until our host raised her hand, the group quieting, and said, “We are becoming just like them.” 

“And who’s ‘them’?” a man, still breathless from the tumult, asked. 

“Those elected to make decisions about these things,” she replied. “And the news media reporters and commentators charged with keeping us informed and guiding our thinking.”

An unexpected hush fell over the gathered.

One of the younger in the circle took his smartphone from his pocket and placed it on a coffee table that, perhaps mercifully, separated the group. 

“Ten years ago,” he said, “if someone had predicted the very existence of this phone, even those in the high-tech world would have pronounced it impossible. But across that decade a gathering of very bright people sat in a circle, not unlike ours, and pooled their genius, each bringing his or her expertise and each listening intently to the others. They may have been of political views as opposed as ours. They may have been of dramatically differing ideologies. They were likely ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse. But they shared a common goal and were committed to a collaborative process — of producing the unthinkable: this phone.” 

Only that claimed their full and undivided attention. A silence settled on the group, so he went on.

“What if developing a health care system that covered everyone at reasonable cost took the place of that phone? There is a growing population of geniuses in the health care and financial management worlds who, if opinions that divide could be set aside, collective wisdom emerging, would inspire the ability and will to create that system.”

“What if developing an educational system that creates a level playing field of all our youth took the place of that phone? We have an abundance of players from the educational, psychological, and business management worlds who, if they worked collaboratively rather than competitively, embraced a both/and rather than an either/or paradigm, could stir the capacity and determination to manifest that system.”

“What if developing an economy that provided meaningful and fairly compensated work for all took the place of that phone? There are plenty of business professionals, labor advocates, and cutting-edge economists who, if they set political partisanship aside, let left or right loyalties subside, and let loose a common mission and passion, would bring that system within our reach.”

A person from the circle versed in group process dynamics and systems thinking asked for a moment to revisit a decades-old group exercise that demonstrated that collective wisdom almost always surpasses individual wisdom, commonly called the NASA experiment. The group nodded assent. 

Participants were given a list of 20 rather unsophisticated items: a flashlight, a shovel, a watch, and a tent, for example. NASA had produced a “rank order of importance” of these items if six people, for whatever reason, found themselves stranded and isolated, with assistance miles and days away. 

Working first as individuals, each one produced a ranking. Then, working as a group, the exchanges usually animated, even contentious, they produced a consensus ranking. When the NASA list was revealed, the group wisdom virtually always exceeded the wisdom of even the best individual lists. 

Back to the phone and those three issues. The unthinkable, unbelievable, beyond imagination smartphone was a result of ardent collaboration. Had its creators vied for dominance, even using their best individual gifts, there would be no phone. 

Setting aside real but inevitably distracting differences, working as teams with mutual respect, and pooling a wisdom they possess only together, what would it take for our circles of geniuses to produce the impossible in the decade ahead?

Howard E. Friend is an organizational consultant, teacher, and former pastor of the Montauk Community Church. He lives outside Philadelphia and remains a regular visitor to Montauk.

We have a home invasion every winter. Outsiders who seek refuge at our house. The mice affectionately refer to us as “the suckers” because of our tolerance level. At first we saw them through a cartoonish lens, but their cuteness soon faded.

We’ve put up with Rocky the squirrel on our roof and Ricky the raccoon in our garage, but the toughest challenge of them all is always the mouse — not Minnie or Mickey or that cute Italian fellow Pepino. And definitely not Mighty, because no one ever comes to save the day.

I cringe when the outsiders come inside, as it takes weeks to get them back out where they belong. Oh, you must be saying to yourself, that’s not how to handle it, and, practically speaking, I can see why. But the guillotine? No way. Without the heart to end the lives of these small creatures, I continue to stand on stools with a broomstick and shriek.

I had to come up with my own techniques of mouse removal, as most methods seemed inhumane. I recall one night when our kids were small, my husband was asleep, and I, with insomnia, stayed up playing PacMan (I was a pro at killing off those little dots). Anyway, I heard a noise coming from the kitchen, and I tiptoed in to see two beady eyes staring back at me from under a stovetop burner. I eventually went to bed, but could not sleep. “What if? What if I fall asleep with my mouth open, and the mouse is looking for another dark place to hide?”

I had no choice but to get out of bed again and put my genius plan into action: I filled the kitchen sink, a couple of feet from the burner, with water and left a trail of breadcrumbs leading to it.

I waited in bed and watched the clock, singing in my head “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” No, I had to get those cute images out of my head. At 3 a.m. I tiptoed back into the kitchen. 

Aha! Gotcha. There he was, swimming in circles like a miniature seal. I scooped him up with a plastic container, quickly put a lid on it, and happily let him go outside my front door while I hummed “Born Free.” I looked up at the beautiful night sky, at large snowflakes, and then I looked down again at the wet mouse, which took three steps and froze solid in his tracks. I cried. (There’s no setting on my microwave for defrosting a mouse.)

One year, I blew a mouse clear out the French doors at the back of our house with a giant leaf blower. I’m pretty sure he survived, but he must have landed in Oz. That was one of my successful mouse-rescue-and-release episodes that I am still proud of to this day. 

The worst house invasion was a few winters ago. He or she (found out — she) must have come through a basement vent and left poopies (not cute) in the oven trays under the gas burners. I didn’t want to gas her, and I was so grossed out that I didn’t want to cook at all (which of course I milked).

One day I had a long talk with the man at the hardware store, who sold me a plastic non-kill mousetrap. My husband (not handy) and I read the instructions (we usually never read instructions until after we fail) and thought we had it down pat.

The next morning, to our relief, the trap’s door was closed, but when we picked up the trap, it felt empty. Perplexed, we opened the door and saw that the cheese was gone, but no mouse; he had outsmarted us again. This went on for weeks, and once in a while I’d see the mouse scurry by as we watched television. 

“Um, Bruce,” I said to my husband. “Looks like the mouse has put on a lot of weight.”

“Really? Is it still wearing those jazzy red Disney shorts and large yellow shoes?”

“No, it’s totally naked this time, except for the little white gloves. But the fur’s a different color now.”

It dawned on us that was not the same mouse. We had more than one. The following day we bought many traps (one of them had to work) and lined them up in the food pantry and waited once again. Finally, success. Every day we’d catch another mouse and let it run free in the woods next to our house. Unless . . . unless each time we released it, it just came right back into the house for meals.

We then made executive decisions: Each time, we’d actually drive the mouse a few miles away to a horse farm. We weren’t sure if we should take the mouse inside the car with us, because if the trap’s door opened we’d crash into a tree, or tie the mousetrap on the roof of the car. We ended up duct-taping the trap and letting the mouse go after we got out of the car. 

Ah, what a relief. Hope the horses are happy with their new tenants.

After weeks of sterilizing our kitchen with Lysol, and no sign of mouse poopies, we were content that Mickey or Minnie or whoever and their extended family were gone.

Eek! The bad news? I had to start cooking again.

Janet Lee Berg is a previous contributor to The Star and the author of a new historical novel, “Rembrandt’s Shadow.”

“If my friends could see me naaaow . . .”

And many of them did, and family too, at the 2017 Ms. New York Senior America Pageant held last week at the State University at Old Westbury, where I competed. 

Ms. Senior what?

Never heard of it, have you. You’re probably not alone, most folks haven’t. So let me give you the short form, but be sure to check out newyorksenioramerica.org to learn the many fascinating details of this organization. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be a contestant in 2018. Tell them Rita sent you. 

It was in 1972 that Dr. Al Mott came up with the idea for a pageant that would honor the accomplishments, dignity, and inner beauty of women over 60, thereby coining the term “the age of elegance.”

And that’s the beauty of the pageant. Focusing on poise, a positive philosophy of life, and talent, the competition stresses the inner you rather than the measurement of your waist and hips. Yes, there’s a message there. Not only to seniors, but to all women, and to young girls who are forming their attitudes and ideas of themselves — am I good enough, pretty enough? — and who every day are bombarded with sexual imagery and model-starved bodies as an ideal. 

Enter Ethel Bennett, now just shy of 95 — and that’s the only thing shy about her. A dynamic, engaging woman of great personal style, she is the quintessential symbol of positive aging. At 1985’s Ms. New York Senior America Pageant Ethel became its first state director, a position she held for 25 years before handing it over to Marleen Schuss.

You want engagement? You want guidance? You want a stylish shoulder — where does she get those clothes? — to lean on? A lady who’s got it all? You want Marleen, empress of all things pageant since 1972, the go-to gal who runs the show with a little help from Bob Geltman. 

And I do mean show, a yearly production of senior talent that includes the Seasoned Steppers, a group of former contestants, all 60-plus to mid-80s, whose high kicks and spirits set the pace for the pageant’s afternoon events. But enough about them. Let’s talk about me.

It was my yoga teacher, Doris Bodine, last year’s first runner-up, herself a marvel of movement and inner strength, who suggested one day last summer that I apply to the pageant. She said I’d fit right in with the Cameo Sisters. A group of former contestants, energetic, positive women all, they give new meaning to over-60. Briefly outlining the events of the day, one of which was the talent piece, she encouraged me to be part of it.

“Talent piece? I don’t sing or dance,” I said. “What would I do?”

“Aren’t you a writer?” she said. 

“Uh-huh.”

“Then why don’t you write something?”

I had lost my husband the year before, packed up and sold both my homes, and bought and moved into a condo. I was making a good adjustment, but there definitely was a hole in my life. Always game for a challenge, I was up for a new experience, and the idea of meeting these like-minded women appealed to me.

I sent for the application, filled it out, showed up for the audition, and performed my required 2-minute-and-45-second talent segment for a panel of judges. Would my monologue about perceiving God as a woman be too outré? Would the judges get that it was meant in fun? 

Actually, I have thought about God as a woman. And why not? Who knows what or who God is? Men wrote the Bible and they gave the best part to Him! No surprise there. But has He never heard of term limits? Maybe it’s time for a change. Transsexual is in! If Bruce Jenner can do it, why not God? 

Got it the judges did, and I was accepted as a contestant. Wow! I was now in a pageant. 

That was December. The pageant was in April, giving me months of thinking and worry. Was I right to take this on? Should I tell people? A pageant? You’re in a beauty pageant?

Rehearsing and pacing, pacing and rehearsing — I think better when I move — I set to committing my monologue to memory. Two minutes and 45 seconds of headwork may not sound like a lot, but for me it was practice, practice, practice. It didn’t get me to Carnegie Hall, but it got into my brain. 

And then there were the two gowns I needed. One in royal blue — got that one online from Nordstrom. Don’t you just love internet shopping? The other, in a color of my choice, I rounded up in convenient Macy’s in Manhasset. I love fashion, but I don’t love going far for it. And then the diet to fit into them. There’s more to life than how you look. When did I say that? 

I did not take home a tiara. I did not win, place, or show in the pageant. But Doris was right. We are amazing women. Each and every contestant, both past and present. We are all winners, because it takes a winner to take on a challenge. To put yourself out there in front of an audience of 400 — the pageant was sold out this year — to sing, and dance, and talk, and play an instrument. To do your thing, whatever it is. To silently sing to those watching and listening, “I am woman, hear me roar!”

Rita Plush, who had a house in East Hampton for many years, lives in Bayside, Queens. She is the author of the novels “Lily Steps Out” and “Feminine Products.”

Sometimes it’s hard to be with contemporaries. Perhaps, like me, you have several “nostalgia friendships.” I coined the phrase after someone I’ve known for a quarter-century, and whom I meet every year in Cape Town, remarked, “I hope you don’t feel you’re meeting me out of nostalgia.”

But I was. I realized that we usually talked about the way the world was in the early 1990s, when I wrote some broadcasting material for her. Since then, we’d been in conversational aspic.

The good outcome of this was that, once we recognized the redundancy of our friendship, we could reinvent it; we could speak about contemporary events and what the future held. Of course, we could equally have ended the association, but she is a woman of sharp intelligence, and I was reluctant to lose her view of the changing world.

I also find it hard to be with contemporaries who want to regale me about their physical frailties. In fact, with one trio of male pals, we make it totally verboten to discuss medical matters. With another health-obsessed individual — who in all other respects is a superb guy — I use one line of inquiry when we meet. The words run together, like this: “How-are-you-Bill-oh-I’m-sorry-to-hear-that.” This approach has the dual benefit of sounding interested and concerned while at the same time moving the conversation along at a fair clip. Before he can answer, I admire his shirt, his new car, or his garden — anything, in truth, where flattery will disguise my indifference to his health. Of course, should he announce some life-threatening condition, I might choose a more sympathetic response than “Oh, that old thing.”

Recently, I saw a chap I hadn’t seen for 64 years. We’d been classmates at preparatory school. Would I have recognized him if I hadn’t been forewarned? Absolutely not. Yet he was quick to say he would not have recognized me. 

Such remarks — when you feel the same as decades earlier — are sure to puncture your self-esteem. Especially when, after I’d asked after his condition, he replied, “Oh, pretty much like you, I suspect: racing to the grave.”

Well, I’ll stay out of your race, mate! At a time when we are reading about life expectancy of 90 and babies born today living for over a century, why this preoccupation with death? Why do so many folks of my generation make observations like “It’s that time for all of us” or “We’re all falling off our perches,” as one of them put it to me last week?

I call us “the Lucky Generation” because we missed fighting in wars and most of my pals in marketing and advertising were able to bluff their way through their careers and into retirement (many being richly rewarded) before the posse caught up with them. I remember one middle-aged boss in my ad agency saying, “I’m just doing this until I grow up.” How lucky were we! Now, so much of the business is about analytics and — you should excuse the expression — “capturing eyeballs and clicks.”

Now young men and women with good degrees struggle to find jobs. And when they do land somewhere, they can’t depend on a lifelong career with the organization. No, their first loyalty is — and should be — to what I call “Me Inc.” No one will care more about their careers than they do.

None of them, unlike us, will work for three or four decades; my generation was lucky to do that and to remain in gainful employment while raising families. Now, we’re told, robots may replace one-third of the working population within the next 25 years.

All of this should make me and my generation “glad to be aboveground” (as my aunt used to say when I phoned her) and doing what we do at this point of our lives. I suggest we should maintain our cheerfulness in the belief that life can go on — without for a second assuming we’re immortal. We should acknowledge that regular physical and mental activity, a few close positive friendships, and a good dose of genetic luck can animate and empower every day. 

So let’s cultivate a feeling that there’s something significant we want to do next before that darn sun sets. Every day, figure out what that thing is. And, as the man says, “Just do it.”

Brian Clewly Johnson is the author of "A Cape Town Boy: A Memoir of Growing Up, 1940 to 1959." He lives in Amagansett.

Recently, there has been a mischaracterization of science as a partisan issue, which seems to have given policymakers permission to reject overwhelming evidence. The March for Science on April 22 in Washington, D.C., was planned to emphasize that scientific findings should not be ignored by policy makers.

Scientists’ findings deserve respect because they follow procedures that should ensure neutrality. Even if researchers would prefer a specific outcome, those adhering to the scientific method do not change their results to fit their preferences. Their ethics and professional standards require them to be honest to have credibility in their field. (This is not to deny that there are occasional dishonest practitioners.) 

Partisanship, politics, and religious beliefs should not affect the methodology followed and results obtained by well-trained, ethical scientists. They may be Republicans, Democrats, Independents, or have no party affiliation, but results should come out the same. The scientific method, properly applied, minimizes the role of bias in research. Good science is the foundation for sound public policies, based on evidence rather than opinion.

Many in the general public don’t understand fundamental science and may deny findings of legitimate research because the findings don’t agree with their beliefs or opinions. There are major differences between scientists and the general public on various science and technology issues. Scientists have a higher regard than the public for what science has accomplished, with 92 percent of the scientists agreeing that scientific achievements in the United States are either the best in the world (45 percent) or above average (47 percent). However, only 54 percent of the public considers scientific achievements in the U.S. either to be the best in the world (15 percent) or above average (39 percent).

Is this because scientists are overly egotistical, or because the general public is less well informed on the issue? Scientists have traditionally been very bad at public relations — conveying their results to the public and explaining their importance. I hope this is changing. 

We should also acknowledge that people’s hesitation to accept scientific findings may come from not only lack of knowledge about the research, but from confusion about the level of uncertainty in science. Uncertainty has been exploited by various industries and politicians to confuse the public about scientific knowledge, as demonstrated by the tobacco companies’ propaganda throughout several decades, during which time thousands of people died of tobacco-related illnesses. The same phenomenon goes on in the field of climate science; the climate deniers and petrochemical industries learned from the tobacco companies. 

In his second week in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order that for any new regulation to take effect, two or more existing public protections would have to be eliminated. This means the elimination of existing rules (that were developed based on science) to offset costs of new rules (while ignoring their benefits) even if the existing rules are entirely unrelated. The executive order makes it nearly impossible for the government to carry out its duties under laws like the Clean Air Act, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The order will mean more contaminated food, more dirty air and water, more toxic chemicals, and an accelerated rush to climate catastrophe. 

Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, not only doubts that humans and CO2 cause climate change, he also has rejected the advice of his scientific staff about the risks caused by the pesticide chlorpyrifos. (The Office of Pesticide Programs of the E.P.A. is very conservative and reluctant to ban a chemical — so there must be overwhelming evidence of neurological damage in young children from chlorpyrifos.)

The administration’s proposed budget has severe cuts to environmental research programs at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the E.P.A., and moderate cuts in the National Institutes of Health budget that funds biomedical research. Naturally, scientists are unhappy about cuts in funding for research, but these funds are not meant to line our pockets, but to improve public health, strengthen national security, protect the environment, and provide safety from natural hazards such as hurricanes. 

The concern is not limited to a single appointment or budget decision, but to the whole tone of the administration. Most positions in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (the president’s science adviser) have not been filled, and it is doubtful they will be.

Here on the East End, science is critical for sound coastal management and protection. NOAA, which runs the Coastal Zone Management Program, is slated for extensive budget cuts. NOAA is the home of Sea Grant, which is set to be phased out altogether, and the National Hurricane Center, with satellites and forecasters — important for people who have waited to see where a hurricane was going to make landfall. Science seeks solutions to problems. 

Most of the debate in Washington is based on opinions. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but opinions won’t solve pressing problems. Coastal communities facing sea level rise, pollution, loss of sea grasses and/or marshes, or approaching hurricanes need facts, not opinions. Ignoring scientific findings can be dangerous, and politicians must not benefit from ignoring or distorting science. 

Public awareness and action should translate into support for public officials who want to support science, and the public should inform other politicians that they are paying attention to their actions.

Judith S. Weis is professor emerita in the department of biological sciences at Rutgers University in Newark. She has a house in Springs.

We live in a world awash in facts and figures. Daily the media report on the sophisticated ways that corporations use big data to identify and track our smallest purchases and our larger political decisions. And who has not been at a dinner in recent years when someone has reached for an iPhone or tablet to settle a dispute — the exact number of Michael Phelps’s Olympic medals or the difference between median and mode. 

When the search for answers turns us away from each other and toward our individual screens, the pleasure of conversation is too often lost. The presence of so many screens in our lives challenges our tolerance for not knowing, for living with questions rather than so many answers.

Recently I have begun to think I would be happier if I knew less and were more empty-headed. Given the finite space in my aging brain or, more accurately, my limited ability to recall what I have already crammed into it, I want to forget more. More of the names and numbers, the passwords and coded identities we are urged to take on. 

Forgetting has gotten a bad rap, associated as it is with growing old and the absent-minded scholar. But perhaps there’s another story to tell. Perhaps forgetting and remembering are not opposites, one all good and the other all bad. Perhaps they are part of the same selective processes through which we become ourselves. We are constantly engaged in a curatorial project in which we edit our conscious thoughts in response to our life experiences. Forgetting is not an absence or lack but, as the German philosopher Hans Gadamer suggests, a condition of the mind that nourishes and promotes renewal.

Although my curiosity about forgetting is prompted by my age, 72, it might benefit everyone to do some serious housecleaning. I know that many of my age-mates are more given to serious anxiety about losing information than to playful quips about senior moments. We are members of the growing demographic of young-old, the graceless term that sociologists have given to those of us between 60 and 80, no longer middle-aged and not yet frail elderly. For us, senior is here and now.

In our youth-oriented culture, everyone wants to live longer but no one wants to age. I am different only in one regard — the pleasure I take in forgetting. Names of friends, entertainment celebrities, favorite songs and restaurants fly in and out of my brain as easily as the wrens that flutter in and out of the birdhouses that flank our bedroom windows. And I am happy to let it all go, as well might my younger friends and colleagues. 

I heard my first jokes about bad memory when barely 40. It was early, but my close friend Pat, who was always fast with a playful quip, taught me that it was okay to have senior moments in middle age as long as we redeemed ourselves with a touch of self-mockery. My initial panic about lost bits of information abated quickly when I realized that it was only a matter of an hour or a day, the pressure of the moment gone, that the missing information would make itself known. Always there, not always available.

Memory became a more serious matter in the following decade when, mired down in the practical and psychological tasks of caring for my two elderly and fragile parents, I turned to prescription medications to combat debilitating insomnia. Despite my best efforts to find alternative phrases, I began to miss essential nouns and adjectives, as well as simple information. For a teacher and writer whose life work has been closely tied to finding the right words, this new kind of forgetting was deeply troubling. Language is a central way we make sense of experience, and forgetting words seemed to signal a loss of control, if not of a meaningful world.

It was two decades later with the urging of David, my younger partner, that I was able to free myself from chemical dependency — no mean feat, requiring the support of both psychotherapist and cognitive behavioral therapist. Initially thrilled by the achievement of night after night of unmedicated sleep, it was only several months later that I recognized a slow improvement in memory affirming that I was not suffering from serious dementia.

Today, we are all on information overload. Living on the internet we have come to assume that we should be able to access facts and figures, ideas and history, in ever faster and more efficient ways. What about the virtues of slow thinking? Like slow cooking, slow thinking allows ideas to simmer, conflicting opinions to be thoughtfully weighed, and our tendency to rush to judgments short-circuited. Then we are better able to recognize that the important differences are not resolvable in evidenced-based arguments but are grounded in divergent worldviews. 

How often would we be better off for allowing new ideas to settle in, or experiences to ripen, before expounding on their meaning? With the 24/7 news cycle, how often in recent months have we seen politicians jump to comment on fast-breaking and profoundly disturbing stories without considering multiple perspectives and what might be revealed in time?

The Hungarian polymath Michael Polanyi reminds us that our most important knowledge cannot be articulated, written into manuals, shared on the internet. Tacit knowledge, built on our skills and ideas, is remembered in the body and precedes language. It is best conveyed to others through shared experiences. The way that David learned to garden by helping his mother when he was young, or the way, as a novice teacher, I watched my mentors go about the complicated process of orchestrating the day for 25 4 and 5-year-olds.

Over time, one of the essential lessons I learned as a teacher was about forgetting. Each summer, as the successes and failures of the preceding year settled into my tacit understanding of good teaching, I also forgot them. I did not want to be haunted by these memories in the fall. Nor did I read the voluminous reports handed to me, at least not at the start of the year. I wanted to meet each class with fresh eyes, to allow every student a new beginning. Forgetting affords that kind of forgiveness of the past.

Some I am sure will accuse me of sour grapes for putting memory in its place. But I prefer to think of it as a release from the burden of time, a newfound freedom that allows me to be more fully in the present. Sometimes a loss is a gain in disguise.

To be clear, I am not advocating the kind of social amnesia in which we forget the history of man’s inhumanity to man or the moments in which we have failed to stand up to social injustice. But we do not need to scold ourselves for daily lapses in memory. I suspect that when my brain is cluttered with scraps of information, even with other people’s valued knowledge, I am less creative and more likely to follow the tried-and-true paths. In allowing myself to forget, I hope to make more time and space for the new and unrehearsed, for a better then and there. 

And in the end, isn’t that what keeps us young and hopeful?

Jonathan Silin is a fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto and a part-time resident of Amagansett.