Make no mistake, you are living through a U.S. version of the Bolshevik Revolution.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump repeat almost daily that the wealthy control the political and financial systems for their own benefit, in effect asserting that our revered democracy and acclaimed capitalism just camouflage the unfairness.

Sanders threw the first punch, saying politicians are influenced, one might say corrupted, by donor money directly or through lobbyists. Then Trump landed the knockout punch, confirming he contributed to Democrats and Republicans to get business deals done. None of their opponents have risen to object.

Sanders says the top one-tenth of 1 percent own about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and it is getting worse. Trump speaks of his Wall Street friends, with wealth earned just by moving pieces of paper around, who get tax preferences.

Revolutions are usually initiated by some event. Here there are three:

The Great Recession of 2008. Subprime housing loans were approved throughout the government, by rating agencies, by investment bankers, by business school professors, all for billions of dollars in compensation. When exposed, the country lost 800,000 jobs a month, and banks will still not make decent home and other loans. Not one person has been held criminally accountable, and few have had to fork over the millions they earned.

The invasion of Iraq. Sadly, the aftermath of our invading Iraq has not been good. Democracy failed to elect as our leaders the best and the brightest, instead putting in power people with political connections who lacked competence, for sure, and perhaps honesty.

The control of Congress by billionaires. When the Supreme Court ruled that political messages could not be limited, it unleashed enormous funds from billionaires on the right like the Koch brothers to express their views against the government helping the less fortunate. Their Tea Party congresspeople agreed not to compromise and were willing to shut down the U.S. government. Today, many of the political action committees (PACs) of both parties are breaking the law by using the funds to help campaigns, not just pay for messages.

Politicians, political consultants, and pundits failed to see the revolution coming because they are immersed in the establishment that pays their rent, and we are all unaccustomed to a revolution demanding dramatic increases in standards of living. Not since Andrew Jackson anyway.

Can a non-politician be a good president? Yes, and even better!

Sanders and Trump would pick the best candidates for jobs, regardless of political party affiliation. That is what has so alarmed the party faithful. Restoring a vibrant meritocracy to democracy makes 2015 a very scary Halloween for Democrats and Republicans alike.

Unfettered by political party ideologies, Sanders and Trump reached the right decisions on our biggest challenges this century. Sanders long argued for greater bank regulation that would have prevented the recession of 2008. Trump wrote in 2000 that we were susceptible to a major terrorist attack on our soil and it could come from Osama bin Laden. Sanders and Trump both were against going into Iraq, Sanders voting against it and Trump writing in 2003 that it would destabilize the Mideast.

This is in contrast to President Bush, who listened to, and appointed, his loyal Republican colleagues, who overruled the more informed Gen. Colin Powell.

Condoleezza Rice, a Russian history professor and university administrator who helped Bush prepare for the 2000 presidential debates, was rewarded with the position national security adviser even though she was far away from being the best person to keep us safe. After failing to protect us on 9/11, Rice was promoted to secretary of state. She advocated for the invasion of Iraq with Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the three so incompetent that they hung a giant banner, “Mission Accomplished,” behind Bush for his speech on an aircraft carrier in 2003.

Is a full-blown revolution inevitable?

When Sanders and Trump tell us not to revere the politically and financially entrenched they are inciting us to revolt.

Trump can regain Hispanic votes because he is certainly no racist. People never welcome even legal immigrants for fear it could cost them their jobs or businesses.

Sanders is safe as a socialist because people welcome help when they cannot see a way out of their financial challenges and view the deck as stacked against them.

Sanders and Trump are both against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, contending it does not do enough for U.S. jobs.

Trump has created jobs as an entrepreneur and might be able to make the pie dramatically bigger, not just redistribute a static pie. Similarly, Sanders could surround himself with people like his fellow Vermont citizen Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, who has fought to limit C.E.O. salaries to seven times the lowest salary and lived by that rule.

If Sanders or Trump is elected it will be a revolution indeed.

Jeremy Wiesen, a longtime East Hampton resident, is a retired professor of entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business and is part of the U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program.

This year there have been a number of fish kills and harmful algal blooms in the Peconics and Shinnecock Bay. In my previous “Guestwords” column, I discussed how these events were caused by excessive nutrients (primarily nitrogen) coming mostly from fertilizers running off from farms and lawns, and from human waste, coming in primarily in groundwater from septic tanks.

Algal blooms, stimulated by the nutrients, sooner or later die off and the dead cells sink to the bottom, where bacteria are stimulated to decompose them. The decomposition process uses up dissolved oxygen from the water. The overall phenomenon of excessive nutrients causing algal blooms that decay and use up oxygen in deeper water is called “eutrophication.”

The decomposition of dead material is due to the activity of respiration by bacteria and fungiliving at the bottom. Respiration is a process that all living things do; the process uses up oxygen and at the same time releases carbon dioxide. This is the same as when we respire — we extract oxygen from the air and add CO2 to it.

Most of what we hear about carbon dioxide these days has to do with its release when fossil fuels are burned and its role in producing the greenhouse effect or global warming. While the preindustrial value of CO2 in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million, as of May 2015 it was greater than 403 ppm. About one-third of the CO2 emitted into the air dissolves in the ocean, where the rate of CO2 increase directly parallels its rate of increase in the atmosphere. The CO2 that dissolves in the ocean reduces the amount in the air and thus the degree of warming it causes; however, it has effects on the chemistry and biology of the ocean. The dissolved CO2 combines chemically with seawater to form carbonic acid, which releases hydrogen ions. The increased concentration of hydrogen ions causes the water to become more acidic, a process being called “ocean acidification.” The oceans have already become 20 to 30 percent more acidic than they were in preindustrial times.

One major biological effect of acidification is that it impairs the process of shell formation in organisms that make calcium carbonate shells — there is less carbonate available in the water that they can use. What kinds of organisms make shells out of calcium carbonate and are affected? Primarily mollusks, corals, and certain types of single-celled phytoplankton. These organisms are very important to the ecology of the ocean, and in the case of mollusks, important to us as seafood.

Growth rates of these organisms are reduced in acidified conditions, shell formation in the young larval stages is impaired, and in some cases existing shells can be weakened and eroded away.

Some of this is already happening. There have been failures of oysters in Pacific Coast hatcheries because upwelling of more acidic deeper water prevented their larvae from growing shells; this was an economic disaster for shellfish growers almost a decade ago and has since been averted by hatchery staff checking the acidity of the incoming water and adjusting it.

Pteropods (tiny planktonic snails) in the Pacific have shown a 30 percent greater incidence of shell dissolution over the past few decades. These pteropods are important food for young Pacific salmon when they migrate out of rivers into the ocean. Other effects that are being discovered involve impairment of the olfaction (smell detection) system of fishes so they cannot migrate properly or locate “home.”

Research on biological effects of ocean acidification is relatively new, and additional effects on other processes and other organisms are being reported in scientific papers every month.

This is happening in the ocean. What does it have to do with our local estuaries? Remember, when algae blooms decompose, not only does dissolved oxygen go down, but CO2 is produced. This local source of CO2 causes additional acidification in the estuaries and coastal waters, making the acidification greater than in the ocean and the problems worse. The combined impacts of warming, acidification, and low oxygen cause intensified effects. While environmental agencies routinely measure dissolved oxygen, the degree of acidity has not been routinely measured. Studies in Long Island Sound have shown that when the dissolved oxygen gets low (usually in late summer), the acidity is greater.

A recent study examining the vulnerability of different states of the U.S. to ocean/coastal acidification ranked New York as “vulnerable” due to its shellfish industry combined with its level of nutrient inputs and algae blooms. That rank for the state really is for Long Island, and Suffolk County in particular, where there are shellfisheries and shellfish aquaculture.

In order to make a difference in remediating acidification in the world’s oceans, international action to curb CO2 emissions will be necessary. However, here is a case where the old environmental slogan “think globally, act locally” really applies. Local and state action can reduce the additional acidification in coastal and estuarine areas by reducing nitrogen inputs. This would be a win-win situation, since it would at the same time relieve the more immediate effects of eutrophication (fish kills, harmful algal blooms) as well.

Judith S. Weis, who lives part time in Springs, is a professor emerita at Rutgers University and the author of the recent book “Marine Pollution: What Everyone Needs to Know.” She chaired the committee of the Science Advisory Board of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection that produced a report on ocean acidification.

Summer’s over. I’m glad, because it didn’t go well for me.

The Hamptons are among the nation’s most gorgeous locales. The women living and vacationing here are equal to the landscape. Simply stunning. Enhanced bodies, refigured faces, doesn’t matter. Walk the Hamptons villages: short dresses barely there, hems touching slim upper thighs, feet with manicured toes peeping from pricey sandals with six-inch heels. Bodies to die for. And that’s just for starters.

Same women at the beach . . . now they’re in thonged bikinis. Flat stomachs. Toned to please, if not pop our eyes out.

Then there’s me — a bit plump and already in receipt of my AARP card. What’s a girl to do?

Even when I was younger, I never looked like a Hamptons woman. But still, I was not a bad catch. Now I’m mad. Mad because when I had what it took to move up to the Hamptons scene, I didn’t have the money to live here. Now I do but I can’t pull off the look. Same thing happened when I was rich enough to buy a fur coat (in the days when we wore fur). I was too hot to wear it. My body temp was (prematurely) through the roof. Life can be cruel.

At least I feel good, I tell myself trying to dissipate my misery. And then I’m reminded of a bit Billy Crystal did years ago on “Saturday Night Live” (imitating of Fernando Lamas): “It’s better to look good than to feel good.” I still laugh when I think of the line because in my heart of hearts, I know there’s some truth. Even with a serious illness that causes weight loss, it’s not uncommon for a woman to say, “I finally lost 10 pounds.”

Admittedly, my out-of-shapeness was a conscious decision. Perhaps a bad one, but at the time it seemed I was onto something profound. On my 40th birthday, I gave myself a gift for all time: I vowed never to diet again. Prior to that, I was obsessed. I never indulged — I was forever dieting to maintain my place in the world where men sought you out, or at least you got a headturn.

My gift empowered me. I pigged out at will and wrote an article about it for the local newspaper. Before then I had no fame. Now the townswomen were watching my every move. While some congratulated me, said I released them from the societal tyranny of being gorgeous no matter what, others were waiting to see how long it would be before I fell off the wagon. I didn’t. It wasn’t that hard. In a restaurant, I drank high-calorie cocktails, ate all the bread in the basket. Happy at last!

Okay. I was somewhat bothered about carrying around “unwanted fat,” as they say, but I learned to deal with it. Stretch clothing was my answer. Everything always fit — pull it up, pull it over, wrap it around. I no longer zipped up or buttoned anything. I thanked the actor Don Johnson for introducing a T-shirt with a business suit. He freed me from the worry of busting out of my button-down blouse in the middle of a board meeting.

Life in the fat lane was working out just fine. At about the same time, feeling at one with the new me, leader of a diet-free world, I let some gray shine through my blond hair. It was my time, I announced. How long do I need to be Miss America? Well, in some places, very long.

As a resident of East Hampton, it bothers me a bit that I can’t be young and beautiful all over again — wear those short skirts and high heels. When I was younger and gave myself that 40th birthday present it was a choice. But now I have no choice. Yes, I can be older and beautiful (actually, I’m not bad, if I do say so myself), but we live in a youthand-beauty culture. For my last birthday, a friend gave me a book called “Getting Gorgeous.” I can report: Getting gorgeous is a lot easier than staying gorgeous.

You might think the problem is unsolvable and I should just accept my age and love my body however it is, but I like a challenge. I’m approaching another birthday. My gift to myself? I’m going on a diet. I know I’ll be going back on my word never to diet again, but that was then. Who’s going to remember? I’m even starting to forget it. I’ll work out, have diet tonic with my gin, fat-free cream cheese on my bagel. Maybe I’ll reduce my age by a couple of years as well. (Return my AARP card.) Watch me. Look for me on the beach — thong bikini, flat belly . . . maybe a little orange in my hair. Ya think?

Hinda Gonchor’s writing has appeared in The New York Times and Self magazine, among other publications.

Once upon a time there were three safecrackers named Cal, Earl, and Gus. For a long time they had schemed to rob the biggest house in town, which was said to have a safe containing huge quantities of diamonds. One day Cal heard that the owners would be away that weekend. It would be a perfect opportunity. The only problem was their dog, a huge mastiff that would permit no intrusion onto the grounds surrounding the house.

“That’s easy,” Earl said. “We just go to the butcher shop and get the biggest, juiciest steak in the place. We toss it into the bushes where it’ll take the dog a long time to get at it.” The ruse worked. The dog was diverted, and the three cleaned out the safe at their leisure.

The meaning of this parable is as follows. Cal, Earl, and Gus are the fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas. The house is our planet, the safe its ecosystem, and the diamonds the many species on which we depend for our existence. The dog is the environmental movement. The steak is nuclear power.

If you are in your late 40s or older you can remember the energy crises of the 1970s. It was a time of short-tempered drivers in long gas lines and serious worries about freezing in the dark. Energy scarcity was obvious. What to do about it was less clear.

As a solar energy researcher at the time, I was well tuned in to the debate. On one side were mainstream analysts, guardians of the conventional wisdom. They noted that when America’s economy grew, our use of energy also grew in almost perfect lockstep. Expressed in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, the size of our economy doubled between 1950 and 1970. Our use of energy also doubled. They therefore assumed that if robust economic growth was to continue, our energy use would have to double once more by 1990 and yet again by 2010.

Analysts associated with the environmental movement had a different view. They pointed out that we used energy very inefficiently and argued that with conservation and better technology the economy could grow with much smaller energy inputs.

One thing both sides did agree on was that America was rapidly using up its supplies of oil and natural gas, and the world as a whole was not far behind in that depletion scenario. They were wrong about that, and therein hangs the tale.

The mainstream analysts saw a huge gap between our future need for energy and available supplies of conventional fuels. The solution they proposed was nuclear power.

Environmentalists were aghast. Not only did they have safety concerns, they also feared that nuclear energy would crowd out the infant solar, wind, and geothermal technologies. They reasoned that if the nuclear dragon could be slain, America would be forced onto the “soft path” of conservation and renewable energy.

The battle raged through the 1970s. The decisive event was the March 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. This caused much of the public to turn against nuclear power. Electric utilities dropped plans to construct nuclear reactors. At the beginning of 1979 there were nearly 180 applications to build such units, with perhaps 100 more expected in the coming decade. After Three Mile Island, no more applications came in and many of the existing ones were withdrawn. In the end, only about 100 nuclear power reactors became operational in the United States, and about that many continue in use today.

This was a partial victory for the environmentalists. Although the nuclear industry wasn’t crushed, it was stunted. And although their victory wasn’t total, environmentalists could take comfort that their predictions about energy efficiency were correct, while those of the mainstream analysts were wildly wrong. Between 1970 and 2010, the American economy grew by 213 percent. Energy use grew also, but only by 44 percent. Even more striking, our use of oil and natural gas increased by only 17 percent.

The salient point, though, is that oil and gas use did increase. We didn’t run out of these fuels. New supplies were found all over the world. In America today, natural gas production is at an alltime high, and oil production is also climbing after a long period of decline. Moreover, consumption of coal, the black sheep of energy that everyone seemed to ignore, rose 70 percent in the same period. This was an environmental disaster, because coal’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, are truly horrendous.

The upshot is that, despite the environmentalists’ partial victory in the nuclear power battle, they lost the energy war. Despite our record of increasing energy efficiency, we were not forced onto the soft path. In 2010, more than 80 percent of our energy still came from fossil fuels, while solar and wind power supplied only about 1 percent. Since then, solar and wind have more than doubled, and with farsighted policy choices they are likely to take off, but right now they supply just over 2 percent of our energy.

The big winner was not the environmental movement but coal. Had we built 300 nuclear reactors instead of only 100, the coal industry would have been fatally squeezed between lower than expected increases in energy use and ever-increasing supplies of nuclear power.

The defeat of nuclear power was therefore as much in the interest of the coal industry as it was in anyone’s. I don’t know how much the anti-nuclear movement was funded by the coal interests. All I can say is that if I ran a coal company in the 1980s I would have given the activists everything they asked for and considered it money well spent.

The missed opportunity to make coal obsolete was the first part of the real nuclear tragedy. The second and more important aspect is that, like the dog in the story, for several decades the environmental movement was largely diverted from what should have been its most important task, fighting global warming. Environmentalists have, of course, been warning against the dangers of climate change for a long time. They failed, however, to translate their concerns into public passion as they had with their aversion to nuclear power.

Nuclear power is as carbon-free as wind or solar. That’s a fact. But is it safe? Nothing is absolutely safe, but many studies have shown no increased mortality from American nuclear power plants, even from Three Mile Island. That’s more than one can say for coal. In preferring fossil fuels to nuclear power, the American people have avoided a small risk to themselves by imposing much greater risks of global warming onto the entire world.

What is to be done now? We can’t ban fossil fuels, but we can ensure that users bear the full cost of their consumption. The best way to do that would be a fee on greenhouse gas emissions from these fuels, imposed at the point of origin.

The funds collected would be returned to the American people as a dividend in equal shares. This would cover consumers’ higher energy costs while providing powerful incentives toward greater efficiency and the use of carbonfree energy. Much of this will come from the sun and the wind, both of which are now ready for prime time, but if some of it turns out to be nuclear, so be it. The quicker we can close our coal plants, the better.

Fighting nuclear power may have been understandable in the 1970s, but today it’s worse than a waste of time. Reducing carbon emissions has to be Job 1. To paraphrase what Vince Lombardi said about winning in football, when it comes to energy and environment, climate change isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing.

John Andrews, who has a Ph.D. in physics, did research on solar energy and energy-efficient buildings for 25 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He lives in Sag Harbor.

At 8 in the morning, the day’s heat was already rising as I walked toward a funeral service I hoped to attend. It was the last Saturday in June in my adopted hometown of Charleston, S.C., and a long line of mourners had been forming for hours near a stadium in the middle of the city. Black and white, young, old, and very old, the mourners had come from near and quite far to hear President Obama eulogize one of the nine Charlestonians who had been gunned down in a racist rage 10 days earlier.

Lost in thought, I looked up as a beautiful young black woman, easily a third my age, seemed to appear from nowhere. “You look like you could use a hug,” she said. This lovely person wrapped her arms around me, and just like that, the heavy lump in my throat released my tears. I held tight for a moment, grateful, then each of us continued on to join the others.

In the 11-plus years since I moved here from the East End, Charleston has given me any number of such moments — but none quite like this. I stood through the morning, one of thousands wilting from temperatures in the 90s — and one of the thousands who did not make it inside the stadium, which holds only 5,500. None of us felt we had waited in vain. We had come together as a community, and that mattered. I drove home, minutes away, and watched on television as Mr. Obama delivered his memorable thoughts in word, and in song.

Charleston is an extraordinary place, where bittersweet history intertwines with physical beauty, where fascinating, often painful and violent social interactions are veiled in myth, and where, nonetheless, there is a softness to life that springs from decorous traditions, civic pride, and an enduring faith embraced by African-Americans.

Enhancing that softness are waters visible from almost everywhere — the Ashley and Cooper Rivers that merge in Charleston Harbor, other rivers, smaller waterways, and endless acres of marshland. The downtown historic district, lined with live oaks and crepe myrtles, is a grid of ancient streets, some original cobblestone, where elegant multistory homes, with as many as three levels of porches (or piazzas, as they are known), have stood, some since 1800 or earlier. 

F l o w e r s bloom everywhere, and Charleston gardens are the stuff of legend. On moving here, I immediately joined the Garden Club and the Horticultural Society to learn how to manage my garden’s nine-month growing season. The first rule of gardening here is: prune, and prune again. My garden is my refuge, and the density of roots in the soils around my 112-year-old house reminds me of those who dug and planted here before, and of the legacy and the opportunity they left for me.

Charleston has been prominent in the news ever since that awful Wednesday evening in June, when, only about a mile from my house, a hate-filled young man massacred all but one member of a Bible-study group at the historic Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church. The shooting happened against the backdrop of tragic deaths around the country that spurred the Black Lives Matter movement. But the killings here brought home, even more pointedly, the odious bigotry that clings stubbornly to too much of America. What distinguished Charleston that week was the intelligent and compassionate leadership of our mayor and police chief, guided in part by the African-American clergy.

More remarkable was the quality of grace demonstrated by the immediate family members in the hours and days following the massacre. They, and others in the Mother Emanuel congregation, became a beacon of love and forgiveness to the rest of us here, and to much of the rest of the country.

We have had no riots. No looting. No standoffs with police. Instead, we have seen a resurgence of citywide efforts to ramp up interracial understanding and to build an African-American museum at the Cooper River wharf, where thousands of Africans were dragged ashore during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Also, it was with no small effort by Charleston officials and business leaders that pressure was brought on intransigent state legislators and a right-leaning governor, finally, to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in Columbia.

I had come to Charleston to start life with a new husband, Richard. Though I knew no one, I immediately felt at home, something I attributed to summers I spent as a child with my maternal grandparents in Lewisburg, W.Va., a Southern-flavored town complete with a Confederate cemetery. Growing up in the North, I did not think of myself as Southern, but I knew my mother never adapted to New York life. She is long gone, but I feel now that part of my family has come full circle.

I made friends here easily, and I remember that Richard, who was New York born and bred, was amazed when, strolling around our neighborhood for the first time, more than a dozen people greeted him. But it was when he became ill, slowly receding behind the curtain of vascular dementia, that I came to understand how intrinsic the kindness of strangers is here.

There was, for instance, an afternoon when, as was Richard’s habit, he leashed up our collie for her late-day walk. He was, by that time, given to losing his balance. I followed him and watched as he slowly fell into the grass a block from home. A contractor was standing nearby. I asked for his help, and in the gentlest manner, he lifted Richard from the ground, helped him into his truck, drove him home, and got him up the front steps, not once impinging on his dignity.

It was not the last time I would go out onto my street to find help to get Richard up steps or off the floor. Dementia care is all about good management, and as a result of Charleston’s caring nature, I found respite, support, counseling, home health, hospice, and finally, funeral arrangements, all unmatched in sensitivity.

Charleston, however, has never been all things kind. The racial divide that stems from nearly two centuries of slavery remains profound. It distresses me that I have met only a few African-Americans in social or cultural settings in all this time. The city has been justifiably criticized for overgentrification, with longtime black neighborhoods broken up downtown, and white and institutional money fixing up and reselling block after block of older houses.

The Charleston School District is an embarrassing example of de facto segregation. Domestic violence occurs in South Carolina, including Charleston County, more than in any other state, and most of the abusers are armed with guns. The Charleston Post and Courier, our daily paper, won a Pulitzer Prize this year for its five-part series on this staggering problem.

At the same time, the past five years have seen big changes in the small jewel of a city I moved to in 2004. Highway traffic and congestion are rampant now, and open space is shrinking. Boeing, the aerospace giant, has built a manufacturing complex next to the airport in North Charleston to assemble and paint its 787 Dreamliner. That alone has created more than 7,000 new jobs, and commuters.

Raves in travel magazines have brought a growing stream of tourists, as well as wedding parties, and new hotels with more than 1,500 rooms are under construction. Developers from this state and elsewhere have rushed to throw up apartment buildings in the city, and Mount Pleasant, a Charleston suburb, is said to be the nation’s fourth fastest growing municipality.

So far, though, despite all this, community-focused activity has been re-energized by the terrible event in June, and it continues apace. All summer, volunteers arrived every day to refresh the array of bouquets and renew well-wishes that formed a spontaneous shrine in front of Mother Emanuel. The week after the tragedy, some 3,000 people, of every description, joined hands and walked at sunset across the beautiful, two-and-a-half-mile cable bridge over the Cooper River between downtown and Mount Pleasant. It was, they said, an expression of love and solidarity.

In only a few weeks, Charlestonians donated several million dollars to help educate the children of those killed, help their families recover, and restore the church. The City of Charleston covered all expenses for nine funerals. A chamber ensemble assembled a free, and moving, unity concert early in August, in which an eclectic combination of artists — gospel, classical, jazz, and poetry — performed before a capacity audience. Donations went to the church and family funds.

And over the Labor Day weekend, a Charleston’s Days of Grace drew thousands to a new two-day rally and conference designed to spur grassroots efforts toward greater social justice, reduced gun violence, and support for voting rights, quality education, and affordable health care.

Those of us who have come to love this place harbor the hope that its soul will remain intact. If the continuing response to the tragedy is any clue, we will be all right.

Susan Rosenbaum Lyons was a reporter for The Star for 10 years before moving south. She lived in Amagansett, which she loved every bit as much as Charleston.

­While it is arguably the best time to be on the East End, with the sun still shining brightly and the local farms bursting with their harvest, our attention begins to refocus away from the joys of a glorious summer. The traffic has given way to yellow school buses as our children return to their classrooms. This is the perfect reminder to parents about the need to plan for the costs of higher education.

Starting early may ease the burden, as parents can take advantage of opportunities and programs specifically designed for saving for college. Parents and others who are thinking about funding education expenses should try to be as informed as possible and carefully consider their options, their own financial situation, and future objectives when deciding on appropriate levels to set aside.

According to a recent study conducted by the United States Department of Education, the average tuition cost of one year at a public university is north of $15,000, and a private institution is approximately $33,000. Consider also that these costs have grown over the last decade at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent, far outpacing both inflation and wage growth. This means that for my twin boys entering kindergarten this year, when they reach college age it is likely that one year of public tuition will cost more than $44,000. One year of tuition at a private university may reach close to $130,000. These are daunting figures.

The costs associated with obtaining a college degree might seem discouraging, but they are important to know and understand. Knowing what costs to expect drives parents to consider various planning strategies. Regardless of one’s financial condition, the best results are often achieved when a plan is initiated at the earliest possible stage. With that said, it is never too late to start.

For parents of young children, 529 plans have become popular tools to save for education. These state-sponsored plans offer tax advantages and are even transferable among family members. Education Saving Accounts also offer certain tax benefits, but differ from 529 plans in their contribution limits.

Student loans, too, are an important tool, but come with a cost. The burden of carrying debt for young adults entering the work force handicaps their path toward financial independence, a goal every parent has for their children. Merit and performance-based scholarships and financial aid packages may also play a role in covering some of the costs of college, but cannot be guaranteed and should not be fully relied upon. Other strategies to set aside money for education exist and vary in their complexity and have benefits and limitations all their own.

Watching my kids paddle out to the lineup at Ditch Plain with the warmth of summer still lingering in the air, it is fun to dream about one of them getting a full ride to college on a surfing scholarship, if there even is such a thing. I think instead I will add a little money to their 529 plans on Monday and make sure they do their homework.

Andrew Stern is a financial adviser with Lebenthal Wealth Advisors in Bridgehampton.

Stella Goldschlag was a German Jew from the Berlin provinces who worked with the Gestapo during World War II, identifying Jews stuck in Berlin who were masquerading as Aryans. Those German Jews who performed this betrayal service for the Nazis were called “catchers.” There were many in her profession, more than one would like to think, their Aryan good looks protecting them.

They could pass, at least for a while, unless a catcher turned them in.

The Jews in hiding — also protected by a non-Jewish mien — were referred to as U-boats, after German submarines, taking refuge underwater, false identities, so to speak, coming up for air in busy public avenues that they thought were the safest.

With Stella’s Nazi collaboration, the U-boats’ cloak of concealment became a shroud for those German Jews she unmasked.

She was a great-looking Aryan-type German Jew who, to be fair, had suffered an arrest, torture, and imprisonment by the Gestapo. Then a release, because her captors understood the potential Stella had in their racial cleansing of Germany.

Raised in 1930s Nazi Germany, growing up with Hitler, Stella Goldschlag attended a special school, the Goldschmidt School, for Jewish children founded after the Nazis removed all non-Aryan, that is, Jewish, children from public schools.

Her family did not get away while getting away was possible, while one could go to Hamburg, take a boat to Shanghai, where no visa was required and important Jews were looked on as Europeans, as opposed to their non-Aryan brand in Europe. Her father had failed to swiftly ask his St. Louis relatives for an affidavit of support then needed for Jews to emigrate to America, to the United States, to be more precise. Basically, the U.S. was not too sympathetic to migrants.

First, to save her family on a promise from the Gestapo that, with her complicity in disclosing Jews in disguise, they would not be deported to the death camps, Stella betrayed other Berlin Jews, the U-boats who were living in public as Aryans. When the Nazis reneged on the deal and shipped her family off with the others, however, Stella continued her work for them, to save herself. She would eventually become known as the “blond poison.”

The adage “one becomes what one does” applies to this Jewish woman whose self-serving tip-offs aided the Nazis in their Jew-hunts. Stella Goldschlag was responsible for the capture and subsequent deaths of hundreds. And she continued to help the Nazis long after her family was deported.

She would sit in an outdoor cafe on the main drag, and when she recognized a Jew she would high-sign the Gestapo agents who were there as well. They would efficiently leap — no, trip over each other — to action, to pull in the prey. She stalked and hunted down German Jews — U-boats — for the Gestapo, as well.

What is one willing to do to survive? We cannot know about ourselves in similar circumstances. But clearly, to this writer, the first step is the critical one. That is, the first step can embody all the others. The logical extension of an act flows from that first decision.

In the two major Western religions, Christianity and Judaism, the first believes in mercy, forgiveness, and love, while the second subscribes to justice, that is to say, acts have consequences for which we are responsible.

In Western philosophy, Kant writes that humans are responsible only for the intent of an act or decision, because consequences are out of one’s control. For the ancient Greeks, however, like Aristotle, referred to as the Philosopher by early Christian theologians, remorse is not a virtue. Sorry just won’t hack it.

Would any of us be Stellas, be catchers in Nazi Germany to save our family’s life? To save our own? Remember, the first decision is the trap.

So, more about Stella and the catcher crews some other time. She had three trials after the war, and her one daughter moved to Israel and would have nothing to do with her.

But now we look today at the Kentucky clerk jailed for not issuing a marriage license to a gay couple. She was put in jail, pleading that a higher morality she held to would be transgressed if she did her job, that is, if she followed the law of the land, in this case.

Now let’s go to the post-World War II Nuremburg trials. Nazi judges were tried and convicted for crimes against humanity because they did follow the laws of the land at that time, Hitler-time.

Oops! Are we hypocrites? Is an act a crime if and only if we don’t sympathize with the cause for which it was done? Hmm. And what kind of decisions would you entertain in order to survive?

Survival, betrayal, immigration, marriage licenses . . . if you live long enough there’s too much to think about! Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?

Lona Rubenstein moved to East Hampton more than 50 years ago. Her books include “Itzig,” a novel set in Germany from 1900 to 1935.

You’re not the only one with a summer rental, reads the sign in the window of the J. Crew on Main Street in East Hampton. The store is currently undergoing renovation and the sign is merely meant to direct customers to J. Crew’s “rental,” a pop-up shop just across the way, but when I came upon it the other night all brightly lit, it nearly stopped me dead in my flip-flops.

We have been renting houses on the East End of Long Island for years now, more than a decade at least, and there is something at once both dispiriting and enlivening about coming here on a temporary basis. As renters we are interlopers, transients. If the pecking order begins with those whose families have been here for generations, think the Halseys, the Toppings, and all those who have ever had a street named after them, and then descends to locals and then summer people, well, we are right after them, which is to say just one notch above day-trippers.

But our status — if you could call being a summer renter a status — also has its benefits. If to be an insider is to lose all perspective, and to be an outsider is to have no access in order to gain perspective, then we as outsiders temporarily granted a degree of insider access are well positioned to observe, and keenly.

Every house that we’ve rented here has had its great points and, as if by dint of some kind of Newtonian penance, its equal and opposite not so great points. There was the house on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton that had a swanky address and was, true to its name, walking distance to the beach. But that house also had a garage door permanently lodged in its dining room ceiling, the house having been cobbled together out of the garage of an erstwhile estate plus its various outbuildings. I loved that funky house even though I understood that it most certainly didn’t want to be loved for its funkiness. The house was like the personification of a failed bid at social climbing: It so badly wanted to move up in the world and yet, for all its desire to succeed, it nonetheless couldn’t help but keep exposing its awkward pedestrian roots.

Once, in the Village of East Hampton, we had a lawyer for a landlord who asked if he could commingle our security deposit, which was legally mandated to be in an escrow account, with his own personal checking account. Trying to be accommodating we said yes, and though it all worked out well for us in the end (we got back the correct amount), we did later learn that our landlord had been disbarred from the practice of law for those very sorts of infractions.

Another year, in Wainscott, we moved into our rental only to find that the next-door neighbor’s house was suddenly, irrevocably gone. This didn’t strike fear in my heart but it sure did strike fear in my husband’s. “It’s the Hamptons,” he said. “Someone will be building a house there in no time.” Perhaps truer words have never been spoken, for the very next morning the incredibly noisy job of laying the foundation and framing the house began and continued right on through till the end of our lease. When I called up our broker to complain he not only yelled at me, but hung up on me midsentence, and then for years afterward, no matter how many times I tried to unsubscribe from his emails, he wouldn’t stop sending me listings.

Much as I remember, and even in some ways hold dear, the ups and downs of each particular house, each particular renting experience, what after all makes up a decent chunk of my life experience, the simple fact is that it’s the memories of the people with whom I shared these houses that matter to me most.

Thanks to both an albeit shakily shot home video and the home video (perhaps also shakily shot) that is my now middle-aging mind, I remember my mother coming to visit me, my husband, and our then-toddler son 11 years ago on Job’s Lane in Bridgehampton. Things were already rather Jobian for my mother by that point as she had Stage 4 ovarian cancer, and yet what I most remember from her visit was not how stressed or depressed she was, but rather how carefree and grateful and happy she was to be there, with us, at that particular home, and how lovingly she trailed my son around everywhere he went.

The home wasn’t large but it had a huge and beautiful breezy backyard that stretched to the shores of Sam’s Creek, and I remember my mother sitting on a wooden swing on our back porch and saying to my father, “Let’s do it. Let’s go for it, Charlie. Let’s offer the owner a million bucks in cash.” She was joking, of course — my father never would have gone for it and neither would have the owner, who well knew just how valuable his land was — but in a way my mother was also very much not joking. Even though the house, which had been built by Leonard Lauder in the 1970s and not really been updated since, was a teardown, my mother loved the house just as it was. It was as if the experience of being there with us freed her chemo-addled mind to be itself again, to play, imagine, and even, for the first time in a long time, to dream about the future. So what if it would never come true?

The next summer we were back at that very same rental, all of us except my mother, who by then had her own piece of Long Island real estate, a burial plot in one of those gigantic godawful mid-Island cemeteries that are so big they practically have their own ZIP code. She was buried on July Fourth and I remember thinking, after a long hard six months of feeling devastated as I watched her essentially disintegrate, is her death going to ruin my summer? But the truth, in fact, was otherwise. Not only did her death not ruin my summer, it made it that much more poignant. Maybe we were all just renters. Maybe we were all just passing through.

This year we are once again in Wainscott, re-renting the house we rented eight years ago, and the experience is a bit odd, like going both backward and forward at once. Last time we were here we had just two children; now we have three. The first time we rented was from someone named Rob, whose nickname, for some reason I’ll never know, was Rebel. Sometime not long after our departure Rebel sold the house to an actress who happens to be a Buddhist, and though I myself am not a believer and the house is substantially the same as it was before, its aura is nonetheless completely different, more expansive, all-embracing, peaceful.

The other day my youngest child, whose very existence we hadn’t even yet wished for or imagined the last time we were here, turned 5, and so my father, now 87 years old, came by with his girlfriend for a family party. My father looked and seemed great, on point as ever, and yet in my mind I couldn’t help but compare him to the him of eight years ago. Last time he was here he walked the 1.2 miles to the beach, swam, and walked right back. This time he barely wanted to get out of his chair on the back porch. “I could just sit here forever,” he said, as the children played around him.

“You know we really should rent out here next summer,” said his girlfriend, who is one year younger than my mother would now be had she lived. But my father said nothing, just smiled, nodded. Later, when the sun went down, my father would admire the sky but then become eager to leave. He was getting cold, and like all good things, summers, rentals, and life itself, this too would have to end.

Johanna Berkman has been published in The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Harvard Review, The Observer, and Glamour. She is working on a novel called “(M)Other Life” and writes about family life on her eponymous blog.

It is the early fall of 2016. The so-called Iranian nuclear nonproliferation pact is diplomatic history, although accusations of clandestine Iranian noncompliance are rampant.

Then, on Oct. 12, 2016, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the collective fears of Israelis of once again facing mass extermination ignited. Four small nuclear weapons secreted in cars and trucks were detonated in strategic locations in Israel — one near Ashkelon, another in Neve Yaakov, and two in Tel Aviv. Two cars were stopped near Jerusalem before their cargo could be detonated, and the drivers were shot dead.

Early reports had the death count and injuries into the tens of thousands, and the likelihood that because of radiation levels vast parts of the land would be uninhabitable for generations to come.

Shortly after the attack took place, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (PM BN) initiated a call to President Obama (POTUS), a transcript of which was obtained through Israeli security channels. It is not a verbatim version of their exchange and, for purposes of brevity, leaves out certain more nuanced aspects of the dialogue.

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, before you say anything, on behalf of all Americans, I want to personally assure you that we stand with you during this horrendous time. Our nation will do everything possible to help your nation recover from this unthinkable attack.

PM BN: Mr. President, as we speak, our Air Force and Navy are preparing strikes against Iranian interests and other non-Iranian targets that assisted them in this attack.

POTUS: Are you contemplating a nuclear retaliation?

PM BN: I am not at liberty to say at this time, Mr. President.

POTUS: I must assume that you are contemplating this course of action, Bibi, and if so, I implore you to reconsider.

PM BN: Reconsider? Most respectfully, why?

POTUS: How can you be sure that these weapons were acquired through the Iranian network?

PM BN: We have been following the development of Iran’s nuclear program and we were aware that some of the smaller weapons they were working on were being passed off to terrorist networks through its Hezbollah affiliation.

POTUS: But, do you have irrefutable proof of this? What I’m saying is, why not take some time in ascertaining the exact source? We can take the lead on this for you and present the findings to the United Nations and bring the leaders to justice.

PM BN: We are not looking to have this horror wind up in some criminal court, Mr. President. Our nation is broken; it may, for all we know, be destroyed. We need to defend our people.

POTUS: But, Bibi, there is another direction you can take.

PM BN: What do you mean?

POTUS: You have already suffered a grievous loss to your people, to your land. I know the loss is unimaginable and I understand the impulse to retaliate, but think for a moment, what will be gained? It will destroy another civilization, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

PM BN: We will not perish without a fight; we will not permit our extinction without being heard.

POTUS: But, let it be heard in a world tribunal, maybe the United Nations or the World Court.

PM BN: Mr. President, most respectfully, this conversation is tending toward the absurd. Our nation is under siege, we have suffered a deep, penetrating wound, perhaps a mortal one, and you are hectoring me about some justice initiative?

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, you have already suffered grievous loss. But what is to be gained by killing 10 times or more of the casualties that you have suffered today? Wouldn’t that be an act of pure retribution and vengeance?

PM BN: Our people will not stand for us to sit quietly by, as we have in the past. We also have to make sure that another attack doesn’t come.

POTUS: I give you my word; there will be no further attacks. We assure you of that. We will convene an emergency session at the United Nations so that your nation can be convinced of its continued safety.

PM BN: How can you say that, sir? Is this another red line of yours? You gave us your word that you had our back — that you would prevent Iran from developing nuclear capability. And so we let up on our guard because we thought that your words and assurances would be backed up.

POTUS: Listen, I don’t need to be lectured by you. Our foreign policy is and never will be based on anything other than our national interests — not the interests of any other country.

PM BN: Most respectfully, Mr. President, was your alignment with Iran really in the interests of your country? You know, Mr. President, before this conversation veered off, I was going to inform you that our security network has been reporting picking up sustained chatter about extending the attack to your country involving some small nuclear weapons being secreted on cargo ships headed toward your West Coast, or perhaps already there.

POTUS: I appreciate your heads up, Mr. Prime Minister, but we have carefully monitored our ports of entry and have turned up nothing. We are confident that a threat inside our borders is remote at this time.

PM BN: As you say, Mr. President, I was just trying to pass on some useful information that you might not already have.

POTUS: Look, thanks, but let’s try to get beyond these personal differences. Recrimination won’t help us now either. You must look ahead and see things through a different prism — that of starting over. And, we can help you.

PM BN: What in the world are you getting at, sir?

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, there are large, unoccupied swaths of land in the world for which resettlement arrangements could be facilitated. I can assure you that something like this could be fashioned with the cooperation of world leaders.

PM BN: Mr. President, that is utterly out of the question. Our existence is inextricably tied to our historic land. It is the land of our forefathers and of the prophets. We cannot have an identity in what you call a “swath of land” located somewhere on earth. In any event, Mr. President, I don’t want to take up any more of your valuable time. I just wanted to make sure that you understood our predicament and resolve and that our military was preparing a counterattack. And, as I indicated, I also wanted to make you aware of our latest intelligence for your benefit.

POTUS: Bibi, please reconsider; you can call this off.

PM BN: We will not, Mr. President. You should know that they will find ways to infiltrate your nation as well, I warn you.

POTUS: Mr. Prime Minister, as I just told you, our intelligence has been working around the clock and have found no such initiative here. You are trying to not only change the focus of our conversation but to frighten us as well. It won’t work. We would prefer that you not implement the course of action you are alluding to; it is in our national interest that nuclear proliferation not expand. Your intended strikes threaten those interests.

PM BN: Mr. President, I’m not sure I understand you. Are you threatening us? We are not asking for your help. I called you as a courtesy to provide you notice of our impending counterattack and to also provide you with a warning about a possible impending tragedy in your country.

POTUS: I cannot let you start the world down the path to a worldwide nuclear holocaust. You must stand down for the good of humanity.

PM BN: Mr. President, with all due respect, this sounds pathological. There is no peace. We didn’t start anyone on this path. We are victims.

POTUS: But, Bibi, as I told you, you have already suffered this crushing assault. Nothing further can happen to you. Your country is in ruin. Your attack now is one of pure retribution. Let us help you recover.

PM BN: With all due respect, Mr. President, we cannot agree with your position. We are not asking for your support or help. We can only depend on ourselves. Remember what is written in the Ethics of the Fathers, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” That is all I have to say. Good night, Mr. President.

POTUS: Bibi, please. Listen. Don’t underestimate our resolve to keep the world from descending into an abyss. Don’t test me.

PM BN: You mean to say that you finally may start a military option and we are your target?

POTUS: You heard what I said, don’t test me.

PM BN: Test you? Test you? This is not personal to you, Mr. President. This is about Israel, about Jewish people everywhere. We were unable to protect Jews in Europe from the scourge of the Holocaust. We can protect ourselves now.

POTUS: Don’t do this, Mr. Prime Minister. Don’t go there. Uh, wait a minute — hold on. I’m being alerted to an emergency call that I must take. I have to go.

Click.

David B. Saxe divides his time between New York City and North Haven.

I became a gay reader early, at age 9 or 10, when a well-meaning librarian introduced me to the Hardy Boys books. I was mesmerized by the scenes of the brothers, Frank and Joe, and their friends stripping down to swim across one body of water or another or to dry their rain-soaked clothing. These images provided a seductive screen onto which I could project my first unarticulated homosexual longings.

Later, in high school, I sought out the novels of James Baldwin, Andre Gide, and D.H. Lawrence. Hungry for signs of homosexual life, I ignored the fact that desires were mostly unfulfilled and the relationships often self-destructive. In the limited literary landscape of gay life, these descriptions offered me an opportunity to imagine them otherwise.

Eventually I too became a writer with a decided bent for incorporating scenes from my own gay life, whether in journalistic essays, many of which have appeared in these pages, or in scholarly articles and books. My writing, like my reading, focused on the politics of representation: Who tells our stories and why? How are we depicted and with what ends in view?

It is perhaps for this reason that amid the avalanche of journalism following the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage I was drawn to The New York Times Op-Ed columnist Frank Bruni’s “Our Weddings, Our Worth.” I admired the honesty of Bruni’s autobiographical reflections that led up to his celebration of the SCOTUS ruling. At the same time I wished that he had recognized the many pioneers who had made possible his successful personal journey as a gay man.

For me the essay’s punctum, its most compelling image, is Bruni’s description of himself at age 16 (the year was 1980) slipping away from his friends at the local mall into a bookshop where he came across Seymour Kleinberg’s “Alienated Affections: Being Gay in America.” I empathize with the way that Bruni was put off by the descriptions of gay types with whom he could not identify and even the archness of Kleinberg’s style.

I had a very similar experience 20 years earlier while trolling my own neighborhood bookstore — they were everywhere in 1960 New York — and finding a copy of Edmund Bergler’s pseudoscientific “Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?” I couldn’t summon the courage to bring the book to the cash register. I was determined enough, however, to stand in a back corner of the shop and read page after page.

Admittedly, I didn’t comprehend the virulently homophobic nature of Bergler’s work, but, nonetheless, like Bruni holding Kleinberg’s tome, I knew that as much as I searched, I couldn’t find myself in Bergler’s pages. Or, more precisely, I found parts of myself, but the complete case studies seemed incompatible with my life till then, or even the one I imagined I might lead.

Now I can see that at 16 the root of my confusion in reading Bergler’s stories of unhappy homosexual men was located in the word “homosexual” itself. My growing attraction to other boys and men had already led to a rich interior life that I could not and did not want to deny.

I paused over and over again when Bergler depicted the electric excitement experienced by homosexual men who furtively found each other in the years after World War II. I was far less certain, however, that I was indeed a homosexual. Yes, I was quickly coming to terms with the adjectival meanings of “homosexual,” accepting a word that identified the desires that so often coursed through my body. No, I couldn’t relate to the word when it functioned as a noun, and the all-encompassing nature of a purported homosexual personhood.

As challenging as it was, I understood myself as a person with homosexual desires, but that was different from identifying myself as a homosexual human being and especially those troubled people portrayed in the scientific literature. I was caught between my life as lived and the 19th-century medical label that I knew others wanted to affix to me.

Doubtless I would have been reassured to know that 20 years previously, in an apartment just around the corner from where I was standing on East 89th Street, three unashamedly gay men successful in the trans-Atlantic world of the arts had set up domestic life together — the photographer George Platt Lynes, the novelist Glenway Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler, director of exhibitions and publications at the Museum of Modern Art. Lynes would spend the summer of 1945 here in East Hampton, after the breakup of that arrangement, and while in the midst of a tempestuous relationship with a much younger lover.

Although I was sustained during the 1960s by a proto-gay identity, it took till the end of the decade for others who were more politically sophisticated to reclaim the word “gay” from its complicated history. The shift in terminology from “homosexual” to “gay” was emblematic of the larger social forces that separated my own experience from Frank Bruni’s. In 1984, only four years after finding “Alienated Affections,” Bruni was able to come out to his parents and friends. This, even as a growing number of young people were identifying as “queer,” a moniker signaling more fluid ideas about sexuality than afforded by a simple gay-straight distinction.

The intensity, sometimes desperation, with which young people search for images that help them reflect on who they are and where they might be going is something that Frank Bruni and I have in common with many others. But Bruni and I also have a very particular bond because I might well have been one of the very people he read about as he stood flipping through the pages of “Alienated Affections.”

Several months after the book’s publication, my partner at the time, Robert Giard, and I were contacted by its author, Seymour Kleinberg. He was working on a new project about the promises and pitfalls of gay relationships. Would we be willing to sit for a series of interviews? We knew Seymour’s work because it appeared regularly in Christopher Street, the magazine that had been tracking the flowering of the new gay culture in the late 1970s. As early and loyal subscribers, how could we not accept Seymour’s invitation?

More fundamentally, as avid readers we understood that books had been an essential way for us to make some sense of our experience. I was just becoming a writer but eager in any way possible to help fill the representational void that other gay readers faced. I wanted both gay and straight readers to have access to real and complex representations of our lives.

In the mid-1980s, after a decade of focusing his photographic attention on the landscape of the East End, Bob would begin to make his elegant, often austere, portraits of gay and lesbian writers who lived nearby — Edward Albee, Dolores Klaich, Joe Pintauro, Lanford Wilson. The project, eventually including 600 authors, reflected his commitment to picturing the diversity of gay life. Bob was to write in an introductory essay for his book “Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers,” “It is my wish that tomorrow, when a viewer looks into the eyes of the subjects of these pictures, he or she will say in a spirit of wonder, ‘These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed.’ So too will the portraits and the words which accompany them respond, ‘We were here; we existed. This is how we were.’ ”

Riffling through my files to find the January 1981 issue of Christopher Street in which we were the lead story, I am struck by the stylized cover drawing of two gay men embracing. I don’t think we saw ourselves in quite this idealized way, and Seymour’s text made clear that although we both placed a high value on intimacy and domesticity, we struggled mightily with questions of monogamy and fidelity, independence and mutual reliance.

I am reminded too that any anticipatory anxiety we may have had prior to the appearance of the issue was short-circuited by a phone call from a friend and Springs resident, Chuck Hitchcock, congratulating us on the story. Working at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in New York City, he had been privy to an early copy and, despite Kleinberg’s attempt to disguise our identities, recognized us immediately.

Fast forward 34 years.

I am driving home from a swim at the Y.M.C.A. East Hampton RECenter on the morning of June 26, 2015, and find myself overcome listening to President Obama’s hastily called press conference about the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision.

I am more than a little surprised by my reaction, because tears are not my way and because gay marriage has never been my political issue of choice. Yes, I married my partner, David, eight years ago in Toronto, and we now enjoy many benefits that would otherwise have been unavailable to us. But for those of us who made a commitment to gay liberation in the late 1960s and hoped for more fundamental social change, marriage hardly seems like the victory that many believe it to be.

And of course the president himself has waffled dreadfully on the subject of gay marriage, holding every conceivable position, from an early defense of the right to marry, to a limited civil unions position, to a 2008 declaration that marriage always and only involves a man and a woman. Only in 2012 did he announce that his “evolving” thinking had led him to support same-sex marriage. I had reason to be suspicious.

But Obama’s words about the slow, small, incremental journey to equality spoke directly to me: “Sometimes two steps forward, one step back. . . . And then sometimes there are days like this, when that slow, steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt.”

In the end, most of my life has been lived before the thunderbolt of this summer’s SCOTUS decision. I’ve experienced firsthand the frustration of two steps forward and one step back while negotiating work life as an out gay early childhood educator, professor, and AIDS advocate and caregiver. As an activist, I’ve appreciated the slow, steady effort of the many that makes possible the thunderbolt even when the names of just a few are attached to it.

Those of us who contributed to the new gay research in the 1970s and 1980s and who wrote about our lives in the following decades are now part of that long journey to equality, a journey that I hope we will not be blinded to by the SCOTUS thunderbolt.

Jonathan Silin lives in Amagansett and Toronto. He is a fellow at the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto.