Just a reminder, since the popular news is dominated by terrorism, murders, and the politics of bathroom rights, that global warming continues apace.

Worldwide, 2015 broke the record for the hottest year in history. The previous record was set in 2014. Each month of 2016 has been the hottest of that month ever. In five of the last six months, the Arctic sea ice extent has set a record low for that month since recordkeeping began. 

Glaciers and winter snowpack are shrinking at the same time. Bad news, since white ice reflects the sun’s heat back into space. Dark earth and oceans absorb heat. This is just one of the reasons scientists tell us the earth will warm twice as fast in the coming years as it did in the past.

It is very sad reading about people struggling to make up for what the world we used to live in provided for free — like the fishermen in southern Chile who were farming salmon, fish that were once provided in abundance by clean rivers and oceans. Twenty-three million of the fish died, as unusually warm ocean water resulted in a toxic algae bloom that wiped them out. (Sound familiar?) Horrible stinking mess. 

The warm water also killed off a lot of phytoplankton, food for anchovies and sardines, which, in turn, are food for sea lions. Hundreds of dead sea lions washed up on the beach. One of a thousand stories. So it goes.

We’re now 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than 1880. What a difference a degree and a half makes, huh? A direct quote from the Environmental Protection Agency: “By 2100, the average U.S. temperature is projected to increase by about 3°F to 12°F, depending on emissions scenario. . . .”

To explain that quote a bit, since it will take 30 years, in the best scenario, to wean the world from fossil fuels, an increase of 3 degrees is probably baked in. If we continue on our current path, it could be 12 degrees. The Department of Defense states that the unprecedented five-year drought in Syria was the fuse that set off rebellion and led, through the crucible of war, to the flood of Syrian refugees into Europe. 

Extrapolating from that model and others, the world may become, at far less than 12 degrees of warming, an ungovernable patchwork of famine, genocide, and war. In other words, the mood of xenophobic bellicosity we see today, in this country and abroad, may be just the beginning of a predictable trend, a trend that will be accelerated and assured if climate change is allowed to continue unchecked. This is what the D.O.D. means when it calls climate change a “threat multiplier.”

Donald Trump doesn’t believe in climate change. Apparently, he does not talk with the D.O.D. He pledges to undo even the vastly inadequate measures President Obama has been able to put in place to address it. Thirty-one American scientific organizations recently wrote an open letter to Congress to reiterate their deep alarm, and to urge it to pass laws to immediately cut carbon emissions. The reaction of Congress was to drastically cut funding for science. Take that, science!

Humanity has not evolved since the Roman Inquisition put Galileo under house arrest for endorsing Copernicus’s idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Pity the grandchildren? Well, it has already begun. Who knew the privation of the 1930s would follow the roaring ’20s? Even those of us in our 60s may live long enough to be murdered for a loaf of bread.

Alternatives to fossil fuels exist and are already competitive in many places. Just one example: Gainesville, Tex., recently switched to all solar and wind because it will save money. The logical way to reduce emissions is to tax them enough to give the alternatives a clear price advantage everywhere. But politically this is a nightmare. Republicans hate taxes on principle. And Democrats resist a carbon tax because it is regressive. That is, poor people spend more of their income on power, so they would be unfairly burdened, despite the fact that they use the least fossil fuel.

Hillary Clinton intends to address it through regulations and subsidies, anathema to the right, which is a recipe for continued gridlock.

There is a way to drastically slow this lemming-like procession to the pre­cipice — a policy that respects the priorities of the left and the right. Simply stated: Tax fossil fuels, but give the money back. George Shultz, an M.I.T. economist who served in the cabinets of both Nixon and Reagan, advocates this policy. “If you give the money back,” he has said, “it isn’t a tax. It is a fee.” Bill McKibben of 350.org and James Hansen, a former NASA scientist, also endorse this policy.

A bipartisan public interest group, Citizens Climate Lobby, proposes what it calls “fee and dividend.” It begins with a fee charged at the point where fossil fuel comes from the ground or crosses our border. The fee would be based on the amount of emissions the particular fuel emits when burned. The climate lobby proposes that the fee would be $15 per ton of emissions in the first year, but would escalate $10 per year each year after that. That’s only about 13 cents on a gallon of gas initially, less than we see in week-to-week fluctuations. 

But the escalation clause would be a signal to businesses and individuals. It would avoid a sudden shock, but also give businesses and individuals time to react to predictably rising emission costs. 

The money collected through this fee would be returned as a monthly dividend to every household in America in equal shares — one share to each adult; a half share to each child, up to two children. 

A study from Regional Economic Models Inc. has demonstrated that this policy would have the following effects over 20 years:

The lowest two-thirds of households by income would get more back in dividend than their increase in cost of living. Everybody’s widowed Aunt Martha on a fixed income would be fine. And why not? Aunt Martha isn’t roaring around in a cigarette boat, so society should give her a bonus for being light on the environment. Until now, she’s been paying — through damage to her environment and impact on her health — for the profligacy of others. Aunt Martha, until now, has been an innocent victim. 

Nearly three million net jobs would be created over 20 years, many of them green jobs in energy conservation and the transition to non-carbon fuels. Other jobs would be created because Aunt Martha would have a little more money to spend, maybe occasionally go out to dinner with her sister. That is job creation.

Gross domestic product would increase $1.7 trillion versus business as usual. Remember the Industrial Revolution? Good for the economy, right? It should not surprise us that the green revolution would have a similar effect.

Thirteen thousand American lives would be saved per year by breathing cleaner air, along with the savings in health care costs from a healthier populace.

The big payoff: There would be a 50-percent reduction in fossil fuel emissions over this 20-year period.

Republicans might prefer that the money from such a fee go to reduce business taxes. Democrats might prefer that the money go to child care and education. Environmentalists might want the money to pay for energy research and subsidies of renewable energy. These are all worthy goals and will remain part of the national dialogue. 

But this standoff in priorities is self-defeating for all sides. Corporations and children and the environment will suffer if we do not immediately address climate change in a comprehensive way. Democrats and Republicans have to recognize this threat, just as if it were an invading army. There is no economic reason not to do this. It is a jobs program, an economic stimulus, and a way to reduce health care costs. 

There is no increase in government or new government regulations or the government choosing winners or unfair impact on the poor and middle class. But everybody, from Aunt Martha to General Motors, will have a financial incentive to use less fossil fuel and to create new ways to do that. The market will be the arbiter of which energy sources take the place of fossil fuels.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stays there for hundreds of years. Every day the hurdle gets higher and more expensive to surmount. Science is telling us that climate change is like a slow-moving river carrying us in darkness. The river is getting narrower and moving faster. At some as yet unknown point, it will enter a gorge with sheer cliff sides, heading for a waterfall with no escape.

As society invests in alternatives, we will also be paying the price for our past delay: storms and floods that destroy infrastructure, droughts that raise the price of food and destroy income, populations that must be relocated, and, yes, the lethal turmoil that moving and mingling population entails. If these processes are allowed to continue to sap our resources, the ice keeps melting, the forests keep burning, and the seas keep rising at the same time they are dying, we will find ourselves on a river of no escape.

Fee and dividend is a bipartisan way to jump-start the effort now to avoid that catastrophe.

Don Matheson, a member of Citizens Climate Lobby, lives in Springs.

Writing is a grueling job that is never done. I wake up to it and go to sleep with it. One character or another pokes me in the ribs and causes me to toss and turn. The antagonist, with thesaurus in hand, whispers in my ear during REM, “Psst! Wake up! You’ve got to change the wording in chapter seven, third line down.”

The protagonist is in my other ear. “No, don’t listen to her! She’s nothing but trouble.” 

Lately, my characters are becoming way too real. They’re always in my face. I throw the pillow off my head and bolt up in bed. Leave me alone! I need my sleep!

I was overexcited to go on my trip to Florida to the Historical Novel Society Writers Conference, where I would be among hundreds of established and soon-to-be authors from all over the world, pitching our books to agents behind closed doors. OMG, I am so frazzled!

The next morning I was groggy as I headed out the door to catch my early flight, and my husband warned me: “This time, try not to pull another Calamity Janet.” He was referring back to an embarrassing incident I had experienced at a New York City conference, which I should explain: 

There I was, pacing the hall on the 1,000th floor, lacking oxygen, waiting for my name to be called, and wouldn’t you know it, just as I took the chewing gum out of my mouth to dispose of, the door opened and I was standing face to face with the agent I had to pitch to. His hand was extended in slo-o-ow motion to meet mine with the fat wad of Orbit Bubblemint sitting smack dab in the middle of my palm. I heard myself gulp, wishing that it was the gum I had swallowed, instead of my pride, to lodge in my intestines forever. 

What were those 10 helpful tips in the brochure again? I drew a blank. But I was pretty sure it didn’t say anything about chewing gum. It did say something about demonstrating confidence, so I went for the long shot, chucked the wad across the room and into a pail. What was I thinking — that he’d give me a contract on my athletic ability? I inserted my sticky fingers into the pocket of my very literary pants, knowing how this meeting was going down. 

That was five years ago, and since then I’ve learned a few things about the industry, have grown a thicker skin, and have given up bubble gum cold turkey.

When I arrived at the elegant waterfront resort full of old ghosts and history, I was immediately handed a Simon & Schuster tote bag containing my badge displaying the era I represented. Everyone was pumped up, organizing tight schedules. Later, we mingled at the bar in the crowded reception room, where we clinked glasses and shared stories, a thrilling experience for all. 

That’s where I met Helpful Hana, a successful medieval author who convinced me at the last minute to shorten my pitch session to two sentences, after weeks of memorizing my novels about World War II. I knew I’d be staying up all night, reworking all that I needed to squeeze into my new abridged version. *#@+*&~! (Hmm, I wonder as I type this — which symbols are used for expletives?)

After cocktail hour, we moved on to where we would dine in the cozy 12,000-square-foot ballroom filled with intellectuals. With a glass of replenished wine and the lack of sleep, I could hardly keep my head up as I sat next to a lovely gentleman chock-full of world history facts. His thick white historical mustache was moving up and down, up and down for hours, and I went into a hypnotic state, somehow nodding my way through the night.

At 7 the next morning, I ate a hearty brain-food breakfast in preparation for my 10 o’clock meeting and thought about how much wiser I was since the New York City Conference From Hell. Here, in the friendly Southern atmosphere, I was ridiculously relaxed in comparison. I swayed back and forth on a rocking chair on the veranda overlooking a marina, not knowing that the writers with tears in their eyes had come out of the room I was about to enter.

That’s right, I was about to meet . . . Agent Orange. Tick tock, I was running out of time; even the rocker seemed agitated. Ten more minutes and I’d be next — had I remembered my new and improved condensed lines? 

I practiced my pitch in my head. “ ‘Rembrandt’s Shadow’ is a historical novel based in part on real-life events of our family during the Holocaust. It’s the story of Sylvie Rosenberg, the aristocratic daughter of a renowned Jewish art dealer, who spends the first 15 years of her childhood without ever knowing her father’s love, until the day he trades his beloved Rem-Rem-Rem . . .”

I started choking on something. A gnat. A damn gnat flew down my — haagh! My throat. Did anyone else see this? Haagh! Haagh! I turned into a cat with a hairball. And all along I thought my biggest problem was subjunctive clauses!

Janet Berg? Was someone calling me? Gnat came with me, and we made our presentation together. I hoped he was more proficient at grammar. At least I had successfully deleted my memory of my long pitch and proudly recited my shortened version word for word, with a smile. 

Agent Orange paused, took one look at me, and said, “Is that all?”

“Haagh!” I answered, and that was that.

Janet Lee Berg, a contributor to The Star for many years, divides her time between Long Island and Charleston, S.C. Her book “Rembrandt’s Shadow” comes out in September.

Or not really worry, but maybe to think about if you can’t get to sleep some night. That’s how the question came up in the first place. My friend, who apparently often can’t get to sleep, asked me on the beach if I ever considered what would happen if the earth stopped spinning even for just a second. He thought everybody would fly off into space. 

I told him I never have considered that. He thought that if it’s true that the earth has been spinning for couple of billion years, isn’t it quite possible that it would stop for just a second and then we’d all be flying off? I then went in the water. 

Later that afternoon, while lying in my hammock at home, I thought I might reassure him by suggesting that he put a stake deep in the ground with a bungee cord attached that he could hook to his belt if he felt the spinning start to slacken (for surely it wouldn’t stop all at once, but begin to slow down, then stop, and presumably start up again).

When apprised of this thought, my wife, who is much smarter than I am, told me that actually gravity was holding us onto the ground, and the spinning of the earth was a counter force, and that the opposite would happen if the earth stopped spinning: We would be held more firmly on the ground, maybe even pushed into it. Since I knew the soil here was very sandy and not rock-like, could we then be sucked toward the center of the earth and bump into the people from the other side who suffered the same fate?

I knew I would see my friend on the beach the next day, so during the Yankee game that evening (which I always watch with the sound off to facilitate my thinking) I endeavored to come up with a solution, since obviously the stake in the ground would also be sucked toward the center of the earth.

The next day I apprised my friend of all this reassuring thinking when he told me that he was not worried about it anymore. The earth stopping to spin, he meant, of course. “I mean, what are the odds?”

I had to agree with him.

He was concerned with something else. Asteroids. 

“If an asteroid wiped out all the dinosaurs, one could wipe out all of us, couldn’t it?”

I agreed, but to lighten things up a bit I suggested that I’d like something to wipe out all the jellyfish. There are only so many things to talk about when you go to the beach every day. My friend seemed to forget about the asteroid and started in about dinosaurs.

“Probably it was good that the dinosaurs were wiped out. How would you like it if one of them ate you for dinner?”

I countered that not all dinosaurs were carnivorous; some were plant eaters.

“Imagine what our bushes would look like then. You think the deer are a problem.”

As I said, my friend often can’t get to sleep at night, and that’s when he starts thinking about these things. The earth spinning, or not, asteroids, dinosaurs — none of these kept him up last night, however. As I said, when I tried to lighten things up and mentioned the extinction of jellyfish, he quickly interjected, “No, not jellyfish, squirrels.” 

Squirrels were the cause of last night’s tossing and turning.

It seems these squirrels — there were quite a few of them — had managed to infiltrate his supposedly squirrel-proof bird feeder. He told me he saw them coming from blocks away on the overhead wires, and he actually observed them pilfering his bird feeder, despite the guarantee he offered to show me that this was impossible.

“How do they know it’s here? Even when it’s empty I notice them hanging around. How can I get rid of them?”

I said I had no idea, and I quickly went into the water.

When I got out my friend had started a conversation with the man in the neighboring beach chair: “Do you have trouble with squirrels?”

This gentleman turned his chair toward my friend. “No, but the voles are driving me crazy. There are these tunnels all over my lawn. I put these radio transmitter stakes in the ground that are guaranteed to repel them and they’re still there!”

I went back in the water and stayed there a long time.

Art McCann lives in Springs.

It’s been only a month since I returned from Dallas, where I, like thousands of other tourists, had visited many of its well-known attractions, including the Fairmont Dallas Hotel with its famous Venetian Room, centered in the largest arts district in the country, the 560-foot Reunion Tower, and the Sixth Floor Museum. It was there, in the former Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy out of a sixth-floor window. Like the other visitors, from as far away as Australia and Canada, I was moved as I looked out that window ledge to the highway below, in Dealey Plaza, where the exact spot of the assassination is marked with an X on the street. 

This violence struck me as senseless even back in grade school in Montauk, where I heard about Kennedy’s assassination sitting at my desk, and it struck me again last month in Dallas, as I played the scene over in my mind, 50 years later. Even in the Sixth Floor Museum, visited daily by people from all over the world, with storyboards, films, and photos all over the walls, no one is really sure what actually happened or why. One theory had to do with President Kennedy’s support of the civil rights movement, and later the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King furthered this belief.

Today, we are still watching the TV as CNN shows live footage of more violence in Dallas — the shooting of 11 police officers, five of whom died. By a sniper who was out to get white cops, in protest of their treatment of blacks. It sadly seems that five decades later not much has changed. People still look at the differences in their fellow man and tend to stay in their own circles. 

I thought back to East Hampton High School during the 1960s when we got our first exchange student, from Turkey. Back then, most of the roughly 600 students in the school were Caucasians — we had only a few African-American students, barely any Latinos, and almost no Asians. The Turkish girl could hardly speak English, and she dressed and looked different from us. At first most of the kids did not socialize with her. 

I had a different reaction. Having always been around people who were “just like me,” I was excited to meet someone from a different culture and saw it as a learning experience. I couldn’t wait to find out about her life in Turkey, and all I wanted to do was ask her questions, which was hard because of the language barrier. But gradually she learned English, and stayed in Montauk with her aunt until many years later. I never did make it to Turkey, but I learned so much from knowing her.

In high school I learned more about the world, not so much from studying history and geography but by hearing the firsthand stories of my English teacher, Eunice Juckett Meeker, who was a travel writer on the side. Every vacation, she would be trekking off to some exotic country and coming back to tell us about windsurfing in Tahiti or buying cuckoo clocks in Germany.

Years later, in college during the Cold War with Russia in the early 1970s, my Russian history professor persuaded me to take a tour of that country, under communism at the time. I had fears at first about my room being bugged and about Big Brother watching me throughout my trip. I thought the Russians were the enemy, and they would not like me over there. But when I got there, at 22 years old, I found to my surprise that they were just as curious about me as I was about them. They wanted to buy my jeans and my gum. In exchange, they gave me their little gold patriotic pins of Russian leaders. They asked me nonstop questions about the United States.

“Is it true that everyone in America lives in a mansion, has two cars and two TVs, and you get shot at when you get off the plane or boat in New York City?” they asked. Back then, the Russian people had to live with propaganda from their government, which wanted to keep them uninformed about the outside world. Luckily, most people under 30 spoke English, so we could converse.

Once we had a dialogue about our different cultures, it brought us closer. I no longer felt they were the enemy. One night, we sat with a bunch of students from Moscow State University in a beautiful garden restaurant, poured the vodka, and toasted our astronauts and theirs. As the night went on, I felt a bond that I’d never expected, and realized that we were not that different after all.

I knew at that moment that I wanted to travel. I wanted to learn more about other cultures and celebrate the diversity of the human race. I wanted to allow myself to experience more of the differences and grow to understand them. 

At a street fair in Mattituck recently, I met Karen Seader of Selden, who has created a program to teach this to young children. She feels that inspiring children to embrace our differences and accept other cultures is our only hope. A children’s author, singer, and entertainer, she performs an interactive show called “In Your Heart Lives a Rainbow” to promote love, unity, and respect of others. She takes her musical storytelling program to schools, camps, libraries, organizations, and events across the Island and the tristate area for children in pre-K to second grade.

“I see how excited and open young children are. My goal is to reach them at the foundational ages and open their hearts to see people of the world as one family. That way, maybe we can change the world, one child at a time,” Seader said. And many teachers are doing similar programs, teaching tolerance and understanding as part of the school curriculum.

Sometimes, living so far east on the tip of an island, we get isolated in our provincial way of life and way of thinking.

I thought about how my family used to eat fish every night for dinner, growing up in Montauk. When the first Chinese restaurant, Ping’s, finally arrived, back in the 1960s, the food seemed weird and different, and I didn’t want to eat it. The only time I’d ever heard of China was when I dug holes in the sand at the beach, and my mother used to say, “Be careful, you’ll dig all the way to China,” and I was scared that I might disappear.

But after a while, it became my favorite food, and out of curiosity, when I grew up, I chased it all the way to China.

Debbie Tuma is a freelance writer and a host at WLNG Radio. She lives in Riverhead and can be reached at [email protected].

In the mid-1980s, East Hampton’s summer and year-round weekend population was growing rapidly. The demand for water views in particular was enormous, and the seemingly endless construction of new homes along the shoreline caused wastewater and other pollutants to run off into the bays. The contaminants made their way into clam and scallop beds; at least two lucrative fishing areas were damaged. 

The death knell for commercial fishing sounded when striped bass became contaminated by PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, and in 1986 New York State, citing health reasons, closed the bass fishery. Fishermen called the striped bass their “money fish,” providing what small profit they made each year; the other catches only covered overhead. 

General Electric was the cause of the contamination. It operated several plants adjacent to the Hudson River in upstate New York. The plants manufactured transformers and capacitors, using PCBs, a chemically stable, nonflammable fluid and a suspected carcinogen, for insulation. In handling this chemical, G.E. was sloppy to the point of recklessness. PCBs spilled onto the floor of the factories, and when the plants were hosed down at night, the waste PCBs were discharged into the Hudson. 

Striped bass spend the winter in the fresh water of rivers, such as the Hudson, and there they cast their spawn. In the spring, summer, and fall, they migrate from the Hudson River through the bays and oceans surrounding Long Island and New York City. The fish feed only in winter (while in the Hudson), and never while migrating. Newborn fish remain in the river for several years before they are large enough to leave. 

While in the Hudson, the stripers ingest PCBs by feeding on fish lower in the food chain. PCBs are nonbiodegradable and remain for years in the lipid fats of the stripers. Their concentration in fish is monitored by federal and state agencies. Over time, the accumulation of PCBs in striped bass reached unhealthy levels and the state imposed the ban. Local fishermen were devastated; they could not survive without striped bass.

At a July Fourth party, I met Arnold Leo, then-secretary of the East Hampton Baymen’s Association, one of several such associations of fishermen working the waters of Long Island, New York Harbor, and the upper reaches of the Hudson. Arnold was not your typical fisherman. In his early 40s he’d left a Madison Avenue advertising job, moved to East Hampton, and become a full-time fisherman. 

He complained to me about the loss of the striped bass fishery and asked if the fishermen could sue G.E.

I researched the issues, concluded that the fishermen had a good case, and offered to represent them on a contingent fee basis, provided that all the fishing associations and their officers joined as plaintiffs. It was important that all join. Many class actions are perceived as “lawyers’ cases” and bear a stigma that can overshadow the merits. I wanted this case to be perceived as the fishermen’s case. Fishermen are hard-working, self-employed, and risk their lives on the high seas. Sir Walter Scott (and Peter Matthiessen, and Joe Pintauro) captured their essence in “The Antiquary”: “It’s no fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.” I wanted the romance to rub off on the case. 

Arnold Leo solicited the officers of the various associations. All agreed. It was a good deal; free representation and a chance to hit back at G.E. for destroying their livelihood. 

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation had 10 years earlier sued G.E., contending that it had discharged PCBs in the Hudson, contaminated its waters, and damaged fish and wildlife living in and near the water. The case was tried before Abraham D. Sofaer, a professor of law at Columbia who was designated by the parties to decide the dispute. The proceeding addressed the issues of liability: Did G.E. intentionally, or acting with gross negligence, discharge PCBs into the Hudson, and were its discharges the cause of PCB contamination of the Hudson? 

Sofaer’s decision was a powerful indictment of G.E. He found that the company knew, as early as the mid-1930s, that PCBs were suspected as a cause of cancer. He also found that Monsanto, the manufacturer of the chemical, had warned G.E. to take every precaution to prevent PCBs from entering the environment, and urged that waste and spent PCBs should be returned to Monsanto for destruction at an incinerator maintained by the manufacturer. Sofaer concluded that G.E. alone was responsible for the accumulation of PCBs in the Hudson, all other sources contributing negligible amounts.

G.E. and New York State agreed upon the remedy. G.E. would cease discharging PCBs, pay a fine to the state, and conduct an extensive study to determine the best method to rid the Hudson of PCBs, which have a half-life of 50 years. That means their toxicity is only half-dissipated after 50 years. G.E., of course, knew this, but the company’s study cynically concluded that doing nothing was the most effective way to rid the river of the toxic chemical.

Sofaer’s opinion served as a blueprint for all stages of the case. It was attached as an exhibit to the fishermen’s complaint, and its allegations accusing G.E. of polluting the river were derived from the earlier decision. G.E. made several motions aimed at getting rid of our claim; none were successful. G.E. failed because we quoted from and gave the court copies of the Sofaer decision. 

How could we lose? We had a well-documented decision, finding that G.E., with knowledge that PCBs were a carcinogen, recklessly and negligently discharged them into the Hudson. Or, as I said in court, “G.E. treated our beautiful Hudson River as though it were the company’s private cesspool.”

In preparation for trial, G.E. examined many of the fishermen. They testified about work they did when they were forced to give up fishing, mostly mowing lawns and banging nails. Ironically, their evidence was devastating to their claim for money damages. They earned very little from their chosen work; more from the odd jobs. From a strictly financial point of view, the fishermen were better off not fishing. 

G.E. argued that any claim for loss of earnings due to the closure of the striped bass fishery had to be offset by money earned from those other jobs. The company also argued that commercial fishermen had depleted the stock of striped bass, and even if the fish had not been contaminated, conservation rules would have restricted the catch and virtually closed the fishery. This argument was supported by size and catch limitations placed on striped bass in areas unaffected by PCB contamination. 

I got copies of the testimony of the witnesses and all documents submitted in the state’s case against G.E. When it was my turn to examine G.E., I made good use of that record. If a witness had testified in the earlier case, I read selectively, picking out important facts that helped our case. I then asked whether he had testified truthfully. I did not care whether he answered yes or no. If he said yes, as most did, the facts became uncontested. If he answered that his testimony was inaccurate, as several witnesses did, his credibility was impeached. Some witnesses had died or were otherwise no longer available. In their place, I examined their successors, and asked whether their colleagues had a reputation for telling the truth. As good company men, they invariably answered yes. I then read the testimony I wanted into the record. I also made extensive use of documents to fill in holes.

The case was strong on liability but weak on damages. After working on it on and off for five years, the best I could see was a Pyrrhic victory. G.E. would be bloodied, but the fishermen would collect very little in damages.

The case was pending in Riverhead, the county seat for the East End, and when discovery was concluded, I wanted a jury trial as soon as possible. The trial calendar was jammed; a trial would be years away. Cases, however, can be advanced for good cause. I moved for an expedited trial on the grounds that the fishermen were both old and poor. 

My motion was granted; the case was set for an immediate trial. I contacted the television network Court TV, whose producers agreed to televise the proceedings. In addition, prominent local politicians promised to attend and sit with me at counsel table. Would their presence have an effect on the jury? It could not hurt.

At a pretrial conference, the judge asked how long my opening would take. “Your honor, it will take a full day for me to describe to the jury the extent of G.E.’s wanton and grossly negligent conduct, and its devastating effect upon the men who sell not just fish but their lives.” G.E. knew what was coming — and on national TV!

Jack Welch, the C.E.O. of G.E., had a policy when it came to PCB litigation: never settle a case. But he changed that policy. A week before the trial was to begin, his attorney proposed a settlement. 

The lawyer said the ban on striped bass had lasted for five years and was augmented by limitations imposed in the interest of conservation. “The company perhaps could be found liable for the health ban, but not the conservation restrictions.” G.E.’s lawyer pointed out that a New York State agency’s records showed that in the five years prior to the ban, the aggregate value of the catch to the fishermen was $7 million. The lawyer offered to settle the case for $7 million, to be distributed under any method approved by the court. G.E. also agreed to pay the costs and expenses of the litigation, including my fee. 

The offer was a favorable one. In return for giving up the right to tarnish G.E.’s slogan, “We bring good things to life,” the fishermen divided the approximate value of the catch as if no health ban had been imposed and without an offset for money earned in lieu of fishing. The fishing associations and their members unanimously endorsed the proposed settlement.

The case was extensively covered by The East Hampton Star. Every preliminary decision was a front-page story. Praise was heaped upon yours truly. Nothing, however, compared to the announcement of the settlement. It was the lead story, entitled, “Fishermen Win a $7 Million Dollar Recovery.” I was the subject of a glowing editorial.

That weekend, there was a benefit performance for the East Hampton fishermen of Pintauro’s play “Men’s Lives,” based on Matthiessen’s book, followed by a big party. At the party, a newspaper tracking “celebrities in the Hamptons” photographed Leo and me; the picture appeared in the center of the photo layout. Fame!

I took a week off and spent it basking in glory. By the next week, I was all but forgotten. Fame is fleeting.

Sidney B. Silverman was a corporate litigator for 43 years. The author of a memoir, “A Happy Life: From Courtroom to Classroom,” and five novels, he lives in Amagansett.

In the beginning the happy couple are busy. Furnishing the house, bringing up the kids, working to pay the bills. So busy are they with the everyday stuff of life they barely see the anniversaries piling up . . . paper, diamond, silver. Gold even. With all this life going on, many couples have never had time to really know each other and, boom, it’s retirement time. 

Usually it’s the husband in these long-term marriages whose retirement kicks up a stir; the wife has retired years back from a supplemental-income job and she has plenty to do with her free time. Hubby is now ready to share the remaining years of marital bliss with his beloved, unsure at the moment of what else to do with the rest of his life. 

But wait. Since the kids moved out, the lady of the house has been doing her own stuff. She’s got her teenage legs back. She’s on the town. No need to tell anybody her whereabouts. It’s no one’s business but her own. Then:

“Where are you going?” he asks. No one has asked her that question in years. She freezes, doesn’t quite understand the question. Won’t answer on grounds it may incriminate her. 

“Out,” she says. 

“When will you be back?” 

This is a whole new ballgame. Not only does she need to announce her plan for the day, but also the time of her return. She’s happy that he is no longer exhausted from those hard days at the office, but how much happiness can a person take?

Destination: supermarket. He offers to accompany her. She’s used to a fast shop, in and out, so she can get to the bridge club. Her mind is running double time. She knows already they will have dinner out, even though she is doing the supermarket. Can she cook after such a busy day? The stress of the inquisition has knocked her for a loop. 

The supermarket is a whole new experience for him. He wants to look around. He needs everything. He advises in all aspects of the adventure — how to choose a good cantaloupe, which as any woman knows is knowledge beyond the human brain, regardless of what the experts say about squeezing and smelling. At checkout he advises how to pack the bags, and then makes the top-level decision on whether to place them in the back seat of the car or in the trunk. 

Lucky for him she remembers to take her shopping bags into the store, explaining the no-more-plastic-bags situation in the Hamptons. (Actually she suspects the whole thing is a bit fraudulent; customers need plastic bags for garbage, so they buy them. She admits she needs to think this through.) 

When she gets to the bridge club she is weary. She complains about her life to a friend, who not only sympathizes, but offers advice. 

“You need the ROMEOs,” says friend.

“What’s that?” asks wife. 

“The ROMEOs are all over the place,” her friend responds. “Retired Older Men Eating Out.” They meet, they talk, it’s like therapy. Maybe they admit they feel like interlopers in their own house. Maybe they looked forward to retirement but now they wish they had a job, but who’s going to hire them when they’re way past their AARP card? And they already gave away all their ties.

“Wow,” says the disgruntled wife, who has paused a moment before tearing the last hair out of her head — a cure for the malady of spending more time together now than she and her husband have since their courtship. 

“How often do they meet?” asks the wife. 

“Once a month.”

“Once a month? What’s the good of that? Where does he have lunch the rest of the time?” 

“I don’t know,” says the friend. “I got a job. I’m never home.”

Hinda Gonchor’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Gannett newspapers, and previously in The Star. She lives part time in East Hampton.

It was spring along the East End beaches of Long Island. The striped bass moved along the rolling surf, driven to follow all the baitfish before them as they had when no humans were around to remember. They were followed by the gannets and the ospreys diving from above, feasting on the baitfish pushed to the roiling surface by the bass and bluefish.

The humans joined in to play their part in this epic opera at the shore whose score is the constant thrumping, hissing, and roaring of the waves. The libretto being the briny palaver supplied by the human fishing crew vying to make a meal out of the monumental scenery of the sea. That talk is often nod and grunt, as one’s focus is on naught but the loop of line, the pop of lure, and smooth retrieving by the reel — and breathe and point and once again repeat, the loop of line . . .

This particular day a few of my fishy friends and I were kept at the suds until late morning by the frequency of the fish we were relentlessly hooking. “One more cast, one more cast” was repeated down the beach until the last of the hard-core fishers stood in a pleasant trance, popping the lure out into the deep and back again.

(The popping plug is a tubular lure with a concave nose that makes a little splash in the surf with every pulse of the rod, attracting bigger fish, hopefully fooling them into biting what looks like a smaller fish.)

Out of the cloudless sky an osprey appeared, hovering 50 feet above my lure, flapping his six-foot wingspan. He then broke into a high-speed dive, wings folded back, gaining on my splashing popping plug, fooled into thinking it was one of those smaller fish. Just before the osprey hit the water, and my lure, I yanked it forward out of his grasping talons as he swooped away only to position himself once more, soaring, then hovering in the constant offshore breeze over my pulsing lure below.

“Alex,” I yelled. “Check out this osprey!” One of my fellow fishers was 40 feet east of me. “He’s diving on my lure!” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex replied, focused on nothing but his line and his lure. 

The second dive came quicker as I was distracted trying to distract Alex, and the osprey was within feet as I yanked the popper from its open talons still dripping from skimming the surface. His third attempt was so halfhearted even Alex yelled out, “What the . . .!” as the osprey flew over my lure yanked from him once again.

Minutes more of “one more cast” passed, and the osprey took up gliding over Alex’s lure — he was not distracted by all the fellow fishers calling out to warn him. Once again the determined osprey went for the lure, and as his talons closed around it Alex yanked the line too late and set the hook in the big bird’s foot.

The panicked osprey flew ashore and over Alex as he tried to bring it back to the beach. It reached the other end of the Scott Cameron Beach parking lot and started back. Not stopping for Alex below, it headed out to sea, where it dropped in the drink exhausted from the fight. Alex quickly pulled him through the breakers and dragged him up to the wrack and tide line.

A large towel was draped over the whole bird as we tried to stabilize it and free it from the lure. I had my left hand firmly but gently on the back of his neck and my right hand flat on his back while the other two fishers had his wings. The “V” of the fishing pliers that every fisherman carries snipped off the hook’s barbed end and the hook slid easily off, freeing our determined bird from the metal talons of the lure.

We were about to free the bird when a rogue wave lifted him and the towel and shifted our grip on him. Seeing that the razor-sharp beak had now moved to within a quarter of an inch of my thumb, I quickly readjusted my grip to the nape of his neck and the square of his back, gently holding him to the sand once again. We all looked at each other and counted, “Okay, on 1,2,3, lift!” 

The towel off, the osprey turned slowly and stood up in one careful motion, eyeing all of us, shaking off the sand and water and at least part of the humiliation. He shook once more, getting enough flutter in his wings to feel the air going through them. Then giving us all his best predator “hairy eyeball” glare, he seemed to say, “What the heck was that about?” 

He took two steps back and flapped those muscular wings in a quick liftoff, banking up and away seaward, leaving us astounded on the strand.

Excerpted from Terry Sullivan’s “My Sag Harbor Bird Notebook,” published by Empire Science Resources.

I live in a house surrounded by nature. It is for all the world like a tree cottage on the ground. Every view from inside is a window to the life of trees. There are oaks, of course, since we live in a place out here full of oaks, with Oak Lane and Wooded Oak a nod to the canopies that shade us on hot summer days. There are also cedars and pines and two huge cryptomeria we planted 28 years ago framing our driveway. 

Water rushes down two small waterfalls in our homemade pond, reminding us we are always connected to that flowing life force of which we are all approximately 69 percent. Crows and bluebirds caw and chirp every morning, swooping by trees. The crows are so loud one imagines it’s a “Jurassic Park” movie.

Someone visiting once said, “You live in a national park here, it’s wonderful.” I took it as a huge compliment, since he lives in Montauk where an Atlantic Ocean view greets him every morning from his front deck. 

Cardinals have made a nest in the holly bush in our back garden; I watch them through the kitchen window. A chipmunk has taken up residence in our fountain this spring. My husband has named him Alvin. My neighbor’s cat, Oscar, a.k.a. Morris, takes the sun on our garden bench most days. 

Our potbellied pig, Garth Brooks, limps out of his keep for a breakfast of oat cereal and a drink of water. He’s old, 16 years now. We lost Daisy Mae a few winters back. She was 15 and had a bad chest. Garth is fine on his own; it wasn’t a happy pig union, more a roommates-not-by-choice arrangement. We rescued the piggies by way of the Pig Rescue Network. We had to be screened to be acceptable pig-adoptive “parents.” Daisy was bossy and pushy. Now Garth is a happy bachelor, having the pig run and digs all to himself. 

Box turtles wander into the garden each summer. We have one visiting now. His name is Clyde. Cleo joined him just the other day. We had a baby deer quite a few years ago, drinking from the waterfall. She couldn’t figure out how to get back out of the yard. We gave her some space, went inside so not to frighten her, and she figured it out, going back into the woods whence she came.

The woods, by the way, are where we live. Whalebone Woods. Or The Bone, as the kids call it. Freetown was the name the original settlers gave this area, because freed slaves from Gardiner’s Island and East Hampton and Native American Montauketts lived here, on the northern edge of the village. The first neighborhood dedicated to working-class town residents. Diversity abounding. 

Today, born and raised Bubs and adoptees “from away” reside side by side. All living happily and proud here. A community. That is an honor we don’t take lightly. We formed a group of neighbors in 2009. We’re more than 200 members. We called ourselves the Freetown Neighborhood Advisory Committee. We thought we needed a proper name to be heard. Really we are just people who care about our neighborhood, the town’s drinking water wells, which are located here, the aquifer, and we care deeply about all the families here and our quality of life.

It is an awesome neighborhood. Quiet, in touch, aware, and beautiful. We did what we had to to stop further development. You see, the town’s drinking water, mine and yours, and the groundwater, was in peril if disturbed. The Soak Hides dreen runs underneath to Three Mile Harbor. The ocean is about a mile away at Main Beach, or two miles and a bit if you want to head east to Amagansett’s Indian Wells Beach. 

We just love nature here. And we aim to keep it unspoiled and undamaged by toxins and man’s interference as much as we possibly can. We are all for small business and entrepreneurship. We are less for huge commercial operations in a residential neighborhood, on a small road with no sidewalks. We are for common sense and safety first for all residents. For their children and grandchildren and elderly parents and everyone who resides here and enjoys strolling, running, stopping to chat by the front fence or porch or driveway, and just being out in nature. We won’t sacrifice that. 

We hope everyone can understand how we feel and can reckon with that serious sentiment and pledge: to preserve our community. We know the town’s governing body hears us and has heard us in the past. We fight so hard for our neighborhood and the fragile environment. We are very dedicated, to say the least. Relentless at best.

All we ask is to live here in Freetown with our families safely and without huge trucks barreling up and down our small roads, and to respect the groundwater and land and wildlife dwellings and put “preserving our community,” which is our motto, first and foremost. 

A new season emerges, the height of summer approaches. We don’t want to rush it or dread it, but cherish it and work hard to reap benefits for winter sustainability. To respect one another and our town is all we ask. We promise to lead by example. We live in harmony in these woods we deem it a privilege to be residents of, for as long as we can. 

     Nanci LaGarenne is the author of the novels "Refuge" and "Cheap Fish."

On May 16, 1946, 70 years ago to the day I write this, I was in a Quonset hut in Camp Beale, Calif., sitting beside the desk of a graying sergeant who’d lost both his legs above the knees fighting the Japanese on one of those way-out-there Pacific islands. Typewriter keys whacked a form in the roller. He was processing my Army discharge.

“I see we sent you to Oxford for a term,” he said.

“I’m grateful for that,” I said. “I’m going back on the G.I. Bill to get a degree.”

“How’d you like to join up with the Reserve, Richard? We can get you a bar [an officer’s commission]. The Army needs educated men. War’s become very sophisticated.”

“It’s also become very stupid,” I replied.

He nodded slowly. “There are those nukes now,” he conceded.

And the words spilled out of me, as if I hadn’t been pondering them for months. “I’ve become a conscientious objector, Sergeant. Can you note that in my record?”

He told me he’d be glad to do that and handed me my discharge.

Clausewitz himself said it — Carl von Clausewitz, the enduringly eminent, hard-ass 19th-century Prussian general and military theorist. Friction and fog are intrinsic to warfare. By “friction,” Clausewitz meant that in war there is a tendency for things to go very wrong. Fog, its complement, is the uncertainty in battle, which breeds bad decisions. In short, we can never predict or control what will happen in war. There will always be fuckups.

We have a ghastly example of friction and fog in last October’s U.S. air gunship assault on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The mission was to attack a Taliban compound. According to the U.S. Defense Department report, as summarized in The New York Times, the following “chain of errors” caused the mistake.

To perform an added mission, the gunship was ordered to take off over an hour earlier than planned. The crew was insufficiently briefed. A database that would have allowed them to identify the hospital as a protected site was not uploaded. Then, the satellite radio failed, further stifling the crew’s ability to receive essential information.

Taliban fighters fired a surface-to-air missile at the plane, which veered off course to evade it, confusing the plane’s targeting systems, which directed it to an open field. The crew was left to ID their target visually, for which it was hampered by vague descriptions supplied by U.S. Special Forces and the coincidence that the enemy compound and the hospital had similar visual features and were located within 400 meters of each other.

The gunship, an AC-130, opened fire on the hospital, a total of 200 rounds before the end, some from a 105-millimeter howitzer. Forty-two people, all noncombatants, were killed — 24 patients, 14 hospital staff, and 4 caretakers. The chain of errors had become a tsunami.

Death-dealing confusion also reigned among our military leaders. The hospital telephoned and pleaded with U.S. command in Afghanistan to call off the gunship. But the attack was continued in full ferocity because a U.S. general, his name redacted from the Defense Department report, ruled that since the onslaught was already under way and had been approved by Special Forces, the hospital had lost its special protection status and bore the burden, the impossible burden really, of proving that no Taliban were there. The Defense Department later admitted that no Taliban had been present.

Details of the event’s duration are confused. Depending on which version you accept, the U.S. attack lasted anywhere from a half-hour to an hour and 11 minutes. The first shots were fired at 2:08 a.m. It was 2:20 a.m. when Doctors Without Borders reported the attack to U.S. Afghanistan command and to the Defense Department in Washington, which claims the assault was called off at 2:38, 30 minutes after the first shots and 18 minutes after the department learned of it. But at 2:56 a.m., 48 minutes into the carnage, Doctors Without Borders complained the attack was continuing and did not report a cease-fire until 3:13.

Nothing occurred in the Kunduz chain of errors that is unusual in warfare. Losing one’s way while evading enemy fire, neglecting to upload a guidance device, misidentifying the enemy, maintaining a violent assault on a mistaken target are commonplace. Friction and fog. What’s new from Kunduz is the stark revelation that there is no such thing as a fail-safe system, whether our purpose is the correct identification of a target or ensuring we do not stumble into a nuclear holocaust.

All of these things, all these little oversights, miscalculations, uninformed assumptions that multiply to become whopper screwups are indeed intrinsic to war. Always have been, always will be. The difference now is not that we have developed sophisticated systems that keep us error-free and safer, but that these systems can fail us as quickly as a car, washing machine, or computer grammar check.

Hyperbole? Well, it almost happened twice that we know of: during Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” shtick in the early 1980s and before that during the Cuban nuclear missile brinkmanship in 1962. On both occasions, we were spared by the not inevitable presence of careful people in crucial positions — John Kennedy, Robert McNamara, and Nikita Khrushchev in the ’60s, and in the ’80s a Russian colonel, Stanislav Petrov, who refused to credit notice from his early warning computers that the United States had just fired five nukes at Russia from our Midwest that were 20 minutes away from obliterating much of his country. Had Colonel Petrov accepted this misinformation, there likely would have been a massive nuclear “retaliation” on the United States.

We also know of the tragic shortfalls of fail-safe systems at nuclear power plants in Japan and Russia and our near disaster in the U.S.A. at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. And then there may be other near tragic mishaps that we do not know about. Of course, we must try, and keep trying, to perfect our capability to avoid civilization-ending mistakes. But it’s a struggle that we humans are not perfect enough to win.

With the possible exception of the unnamed U.S general who refused to call off the gunship when it became likely we were destroying a hospital rather than the Taliban, I can’t find it in my heart to demand, as many do, that the soldiers who participated in the Kunduz event be charged with war crimes.

In the German Rhineland, where I served in 1945 near the end of the European war, U.S. forces did not hesitate to level towns that we’d decided, not always with certainty, were sheltering German troops who wanted to continue the war. We were much too preoccupied with our own survival to consider the small chance that some tribunal in the remote future would be assembled to look back and punish us.

With all my 70 years as an advocate for nonviolent solutions, I am still not sure that in such a time and place as Kunduz, I wouldn’t have acted as the G.I.s in the AC-130 aircrew did. Indeed, God forgive me, I might even have relished it.

Being a conscientious objector may be a futile gesture, I know, especially in these days of president-candidate trash talk diplomacy. But it is one small thing I can do, keep as a part of me and hope that somehow it will matter.

Richard Rosenthal lives in East Hampton. A collection of his work, “My Writing and Advocacy, 1943-2016,” which includes his “Guestwords” articles and Star letters to the editor, is available at the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection and at the Amagansett Library.

I recently moved from New York City to the town upstate where my children and grandchildren live. It will likely be the last of my many moves, and I gathered a lifetime’s worth of books, writings, photos, mementos, souvenirs, and other accumulated stuff. As I began to sort through it all, hoping to pre-empt my children’s Dumpster, I came upon my college graduation book. Friends and fond memories returned, including a humorous history of our class, which began, “Nothing happened sophomore year.”

While mocking sophomores is classic college humor — “Even freshmen look down on sophomores,” my cousin quipped — in our case, I now realize, the witticism missed badly. Something extraordinary did happen in 1954. On May 17, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” education for blacks, a common practice protected by law for half a century, was unconstitutional.

None of the serious historians of our college years mentioned Brown either, although among reminiscences of football, girls, favorite professors, and movies of the day, they did describe social and political events. They wrote of Joseph McCarthy (“We debated the McCarthy censure issue”), Billy Graham (“The campus was, for a week, a hotbed of religious inquiry”), and uprisings in Poland and Hungary (“We pledged money in large quantities for the immediate relief of Hungarian refugees”).

Nor were we unaware of racial conflict. When Eugene Cook, the attorney general of Georgia, defended segregation in a visiting lecture, “We discussed segregation and the problems involved.” Reports of Emmett Till’s brutal murder in Mississippi in August 1955, and of white students “our own age” assaulting blacks at the University of Alabama, produced in us a “willingness to discuss the problem frankly, in a troubled spirit of moderation.” And after graduation we expected to face “crises” — “in public education, in solving the problems of biracial existence, and in all areas of foreign affairs.”

I’m sure this all seemed reasonable to me. And yet, how did we miss the Brown decision?

The answer, I’m afraid, knowing what I know today, lies in what we meant by racial “problems.” In the eyes of privileged white boys in the 1950s, blacks had their roles in society — as baseball players, shoeshine boys, jazz musicians, waiters and maids, singers, actors, and soldiers — and filled them without problem. Nor was it a problem when Marian Anderson, with a voice that Toscanini said appears once in a hundred years, became the first black singer in the Metropolitan Opera in 1955.

I’m not sure we were aware that in 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, where seating was segregated, or that Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to sing outdoors at the Lincoln Memorial to 75,000 fans. But if we were aware, I believe we would have accepted it all — the segregated seating in our nation’s capital and the respect shown to a great black singer — as simply the way our society functioned. We might have applauded Mrs. Roosevelt’s resigning from the D.A.R., but for a Constitution Hall recital in 1955 we would have occupied our designated section, devoid of any black faces, without shame.

No, the problem for us was not the struggle between freed blacks and white society — a struggle that began in 1865 and was still engaged during our college years 90 years later. We were as blithely ignorant of that long history as of the Brown decision. The problems we recognized arose, rather, when the status quo was challenged, or, in the belligerent phrase still heard today, when “troublemakers” began to stir things up.

I don’t know whether such a view defined us as racists 60 years ago. For myself, what I’ve since learned about racial struggles has broadened my understanding of our nation’s history.

Most important, it’s clear to me that slavery itself has marked race relations, not only when Southern states fought to preserve it in law, but when, having lost the fight, they attempted to maintain at least its social structure. The claim that the South rebelled against an oppressive central government to defend “states’ rights” — a claim that many Northerners accepted at the time and still believe — is belied by the evidence. 

The government that 11 “Confederate States of America” formed in Richmond, Va., in 1861 was a mirror image of the government in Washington, with precisely the same legislative, executive, and judicial structures, and their Constitution was virtually identical to the 1787 Constitution, except for its protection of slavery. The same restrictions on the Confederate Congress are enumerated, except: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves [my italics], shall be passed.”

Likewise, in planning for new “territory” and new states, the Confederate Constitution copied the 1787 Constitution whole, with one addition: “In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery [my italics] as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government.”

As for states’ rights, it is worth quoting in full the “supreme law” section of the Confederate Constitution, which repeated word for word the same section in the 1787 Constitution: “This Constitution, and the laws of the Confederate States, made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the Confederate States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

In short, the vaunted “way of life” that some Southerners still claim they were defending, and what their Confederate flags supposedly “represent” — what in fact their way of life would have continued to be had they won the Civil War — turns out to be constitutionally pretty much the Northern way of life, but with slavery.

So it is not surprising that after the Confederate Army surrendered in April 1865, and the 13th Amendment ending legal slavery was ratified that December, Southerners began to consider how to maintain their way of life. The 90-year struggle was engaged.

It is impossible in a few words to describe the ebbs and flows of the long racial conflict that culminated in the landmark Brown decision. To anyone with limited knowledge of it, I recommend the following: “Simple Justice,” an indispensable 1975 book by Richard Kluger; “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” 1973, by C. Vann Woodward; the writings and the life story of W.E.B. DuBois, first black Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, and the life of Thurgood Marshall, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Brown decision. Here are only a few highlights, and lowlights, of those 90 years.

Education came first. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created by Congress to help four million slaves transition to freedom, built hospitals and provided medical care and food, but its major efforts went to building more than 1,000 schools for black children and to establishing colleges: Fisk University in Nashville in 1866, named for the general who provided space in a former Union Army barracks, Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1867, named for another Union general, and in 1868, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Va. Booker T. Washington, born a slave in 1856, graduated from Hampton in 1875 and in 1881 went to Tuskegee, Ala., to head the new college there. These institutions trained generations of professional black men and women and all remain flourishing universities today.

However, as critical as black schools and colleges were to improving many black lives, the Southern way of life continued to constrain most of the millions of freed blacks. And while the 14th Amendment (1868) extended the “equal protection of the laws” to blacks, and the 15th Amendment (1870) extended voting rights, they also marked the end of most federal efforts to impact race relations. There were no further constitutional amendments until 1913 (allowing income taxes), and the Freedmen’s Bureau was closed in 1872. 

Over the following decades, blacks in the South did manage to vote in sufficient numbers to elect hundreds of local black officials, and between 1869 and 1901, 20 black representatives and two black senators sat in the U.S. Congress. Still, Southern states continued to press for laws limiting black rights, and in 1896, with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, they triumphed. Plessy ruled that the “equal protection of the laws” clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to segregation, which left Southern whites free to pass laws further constricting black participation in politics. The intended effect was immediate: Whereas 130,000 blacks were registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896, by 1904 the number was 1,342.

In the aftermath of Plessy, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909 by a coalition of whites and blacks, and it succeeded in restoring some voting rights. In 1936 Thurgood Marshall, a law graduate of Howard University, joined its legal staff to focus on educational equality for blacks. The decision he won in Brown overturned Plessy and established the constitutional requirement for equal protection of the laws as the basis for legal challenges to segregation.

Sixty years later, the gross mistreatment of our black citizens continues, in grade schools, legal defense, prison sentences, social services, and municipal infrastructure. I can only view it still as a privileged white, because that’s what I am. But knowing what I know, I would urge a new generation of Thurgood Marshalls to continue the fight for equal protection of the laws. I will applaud their successes.

Malcolm Mitchell, who until recently lived part time in East Hampton, is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine.