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.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Newly (and consciously) coupled, we needed to be comfortable driving each other’s cars. What better plan than to drive the vehicles to the car wash, followed by a leisurely lunch at Southampton’s Sant Ambroeus?

So we set out from Amagansett, she in my Mercedes and I in her Range Rover. Emerging from the car wash 45 minutes later, I can’t spot my Mercedes. Surely the smaller car would be finished first? I park on the shoulder of Route 27 and wait for my car to emerge. Five minutes pass before my cellphone rings. This dialogue ensues:

She: “Where are you?”

Me: “Waiting for you to come out of the car wash.”

She: “I’m out. I’m parked on the Southampton road. I’ll wait for you on the shoulder.”

I gun the eight cylinders and hang a right toward Southampton. After a few minutes, I spot her glossy gray hair some hundred yards ahead. She waves and eases into the traffic. I follow her. In less than a minute, I realize I must have lost her. There’s no Mercedes convertible in the knot of cars ahead.

Arriving at the outskirts of Southampton, I parallel park the big vehicle and call her. More dialogue:

Me: “Where are you?”

She: “I’m in the village parking lot. Where are you?”

Me: “Parked on the street just outside town.”

She: “Well, what are you waiting for? Drive in and go straight to the village parking lot; you’ll see a sign. I’ll meet you there.”

I work my way out of the parking spot and drive into town. Before I can turn into the parking lot, I see her waving me toward an empty parking space on Main Street. I slide the Range Rover in, lock it, and we head for lunch at Sant Ambroeus. It turns out to be a long lunch enlivened by a glass of wine, and then we window-shop for a while to let the alcohol neutralize.

“So,” I say, “should we head back?”

“Guess so. I have an appointment in East Hampton, so why don’t you keep my car and I will bring yours to your place and we can swap them there.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I say, and we part, she to the parking lot, me to my spot on Main Street.

Forty-five minutes later and four hours since we left the car wash, I swing into my Amagansett driveway.

My cellphone rings. “Southampton Car Wash here. Sir, when are you coming to collect your car?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your car, the Mercedes convertible? It needs to be picked up. You took the wrong Mercedes.”

Blood leaves my body. “I’m on my way. How did you get my cell number?”

“We rang the cops. They ran the plates. Your name popped up.”

“Great, so now I’m a felon. And where’s the other car?”

“You mean the one that’s missing? You’re driving it, I hope.”

“Not exactly. But I think I know where it might be.”

“Well, sir, I suggest you bring it back as soon as possible. We have a very unhappy customer here who’s been waiting nearly five hours for his vehicle.”

“Like I said, I’m on my way.”

I call her.

“Where are you?”

“At White’s Pharmacy. Why?”

“You drove away with the wrong car. Don’t move. I’m on my way.”

At the parking lot, I can see it’s a Mercedes, but it’s not my Mercedes.

“But it’s a Mercedes,” she says.

“Yes, that much is true, but it’s blue, not gray, and it’s a sedan, not a convertible. All I could see when you waved at me was your hair, not the color of the car.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” is all she says.

I leave her with her Range Rover and drive the blue Mercedes to the car wash, but not before filling it with gas.

I hand the keys to the car’s visibly irritated owner. “Is it driving okay?” he asks. Fortunately, he avoids eye contact.

Assuming this to be a man-to-man question, I say, “Well, actually it’s pulling a bit to the left.”

He looks alarmed. “It wasn’t doing that this morning. I’m going to drive it around the block. I’ll be back if there’s a problem.”

He doesn’t return.

For weeks afterward, the car wash staff call out the same greeting: “Hey, here’s the guy who drove off with another guy’s car!”

Eighteen months later, we’re still together.

Brian Clewly Johnson recently published a memoir, “A Cape Town Boy.”

I am sitting in my car waiting for the Quogue courthouse to open when I see this on my mobile phone: “Results of a study by AAA indicate that motorists using hands-free technologies in their cars could miss stop signs, pedestrians, and other vehicles while the mind is readjusting to the task of driving. Drivers can be distracted for 27 seconds after changing music or dialing a phone number.” 

The courthouse opens for business. I am patted down by an unjolly officer. He is looking for cellphones and guns. I am clean. In due time, the bailiff offers me a deal: plead guilty, pay $250, and receive one point on your record. If you want to fight the ticket, a court date will be set and you have to engage a lawyer and costs will spiral upward and the points will be between 3 and 5. 

All this because my left hand held my smartphone to my left ear as I sat at a red light and talked. Talked is not quite accurate. Listened is more like it. A dishwasher had been arrested the night before and needed bail money. I only answered my cell when it was the restaurant calling; we have a brief history of fires, firings, fights, and intransigent inspectors. It took two minutes to hear the bad news and another minute before I got pulled over. The policeman was curt and disinterested in the details. He saw what he saw. I was using my mobile phone while driving a vehicle. It was not hands-free. Nothing is free.

That was three years ago. I had forgotten all about it until I received a very belated summons last month. Upon reading, I called the courthouse in Quoque and asked if there had been some mistake. 

“Mistake?” echoed the voice. “No mistake. You’re a lucky guy. You had three years to save up and prepare.” 

I called my attorney to find out if this were kosher, hoping there was some statute of limitations. “I’ll tell you what to do,” he said. “Go to court, plead guilty, pay the fine, pay the surcharge, go about your life. Nothing I can do about it.” (Just yesterday, I received a bill from said attorney for the sage advice that he had no advice: $56.25 for one quarter hour. Nothing I can do about it.)

The judge asks how I plea. I take a deep breath. I look at the bailiff. I look at the American flag. I am one patriotic sonuvabitch who has had a full month to think about this moment and what I want to say.

“I drive an old car, your honor. My dashboard has buttons and levers and my flat tire can’t fix itself. There’s no compass, no screen, and no bells or whistles to warn me about black ice or when the Ice Capades are coming to town. I drive an actual car, not a computer on wheels. It is therefore deaf and dumb. No Bluetooth.” 

“But I am a safe driver, your honor. Check the record. I steer clear of dangerous activities. Like eating French fries. For some reason, French fries don’t come in normal cups that nestle into cupholders. They come in upside-down paper ziggurats that are impossible to hold or stand up in a stationary fashion and they need catsup and catsup comes in those little plastic packets that require hands (and teeth) to open and you squeeze them and invariably squirt dribs on your pants or shirt and then you have to find a napkin and wet it and rub the right spot and let’s face it, your honor, French fries are far more intensely hands-on and hazardous than listening to a cellphone for two minutes.”

“While we’re at it, what about cats? Not the Broadway cast album — though that can make you want to drive head-on into oncoming traffic. I mean the actual felines who sit smugly on their owners’ shoulders and get spooked if they look out the window or see a fly buzzing around the windshield. They may be cute on YouTube, but not so much when their sharp claws are untethered in the front seat of a moving vehicle. And don’t get me started on the perils of driving with a loose ferret. Or hot coffee. Or my wife.”

“You married, your honor? I love my wife as much as the next guy, but, er, oops, that came out wrong, you know what I mean — anyway, she blames me when an S.U.V. cuts us off and then she carps about how I pick the wrong route and always end up stuck in that perpetual bottleneck called Water Mill. This is not good for my concentration. Worse is when she gets a call from a girlfriend and they yak interminably and I have to listen to that palaver and, well, there ought to be a law, your honor — DWM. Driving While Married.” 

“On the other hand, if you’re single, that first hot date can be a killer. You’re a nervous wreck to begin with so you have a drink to calm down and then your date slides into the car with a short skirt and smells so sweet and tells you right off the bat that she just got a new tattoo on a particular swath of skin and you figure you might as well drive directly to this courtroom and pay a large fine and be done with it. Distraction in extremis. DWH, your honor. Driving While Horny, even though some have misinterpreted that acronym to mean Driving With Hard-On, but that would constitute a law with gender bias. Am I right?” 

“One more thing, your honor, I don’t know your politics, but when Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity start spewing the news and rearranging reality, they can drive any right-minded person off the road. You start to pound your fist on the steering wheel and your blood pressure skyrockets and if you’re smart, you switch the station to some music, but if it’s a live Phish jam, the trance might dislodge your gyroscope and that’s not good. Some friends are convinced that ‘Bouncing Around the Room’ triggers acid flashbacks, so they avoid the radio altogether and pop in a talking book. If it’s ‘The Notebook’ or ‘My Sister’s Keeper,’ they end up sobbing, all bubbly and blurry-eyed, and that makes them more of a menace to society than a smartphone.”

“In summation, your honor, as much as I try, I can’t get my head around all this money and punishment for a two-minute phone call that led to getting someone out of jail three years ago. You probably don’t remember him. He hasn’t been back here and I don’t think he will be. He’s a good guy who learned his lesson. Which is more than I can say for myself.”

How does the judge react to all this? Well, truth be told, hand to Bible, I didn’t really deliver the above monologue, not a word of it. I thought about it, but what I ended up saying was, “Do you accept credit cards, your honor?”

Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur. He lives in Bridgehampton.

When I give tours to children and adults at the Parrish Art Museum, I always tell them, “Touch with your eyes, not with your hands.” So when I visited the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green in Much Hadham, England, I was in for a surprise. 

The 70-acre estate revealed a landscape dotted with Moore’s sculptures. Children and entire families were stroking them as if it were a petting zoo. There was no security to say, “Don’t touch.” The guards at the Parrish would be scandalized. At the Parrish I give my intro speech on “museum manners” — no touching, no running, don’t get too close to a work of art, raise your hand for a question. This was indeed a different kind of museum.

I read in the brochure that Henry Moore was born in Castleford, England, on July 30, 1898, and died Aug. 31, 1986. One of the themes of his work is suggestive of the female body, and there is a series of sculpted family groupings. The undulating form of his reclining figures reflects the landscape and hills of his birthplace, the county of Yorkshire.

As I walked through the grounds, the sun warmed the sculptures, making the bronze glow as if lit from within. Shining a spotlight on a nude as if she were a Hollywood star, the sun created its own special effects. Then the flat field opened into a panorama of lush green and sky and sculpture. I was humbled by the monumentality of Moore’s art, its heroic, larger-than-life quality. I felt small and insignificant as I reclined my head against a massive bronze for support.

But the sculptures were easy to relate to because of their universal themes of mother and child, family, and positive and negative space. “Harlow Family Group,” of a mother, father, and child, reminded me of when we were a young family and my son sat on my lap for a group portrait. I touched the figures; I caressed the curves of a nude woman, willing her to come alive. I felt the texture of the crosshatch work Moore had applied. 

I could see his dedication in “Large Reclining Figure.” She sits atop a hill like a Greek goddess surveying her subjects from Mount Olympus, slightly removed from the world of mortals yet still able to see their machinations, desires, and foibles. She beckoned me to pay homage to her strength and grace, to her sexuality. I walked closer to receive her blessing. She is regal; she is woman, earth mother, and creator of life. She is silhouetted against the celestial blue — part of the sky and part of the earth. 

I stepped onto her pedestal, mimicking her pose in my black leggings and black quilted jacket, leaning on my elbow the same way she was leaning, with one leg bent for balance, giving my best “come hither” look. She is bronze, not flesh, not going anywhere, impervious to weather, to time, to the elements, but gaining a lovely patina of age. I, however, am acquiring wrinkles of experience, but we looked good together, each relaxed in our own way.

Moore masterfully combines opposites — hard bronze with voluptuous curvy body shapes that I traced with my fingertips. Some sculptures form a puzzle with shapes within shapes like a fetus in a womb. He shows me the texture of an expression, the arched angle of a neck, a hollow look to an eye, a hole for an ear that listens to the wind.

But my favorite is “Sheep Piece,” a sculpture of large sheep shapes, one appearing to be humping another from behind. The forms are roundish, dirty gray like the color of the real sheep munching grass contentedly nearby. The real sheep and the sculpture sheep mirror each other, overlapping and making the perfect foil, creating an echo that reverberates across the field. I maneuvered gingerly around the black, shiny balls of sheep excrement, careful not to step in them.

The real sheep didn’t seem impressed by their bronze cousins. One sheep wandered over to join his friends. With determination, he leaned against Henry Moore’s sheep-inspired sculpture and energetically scratched his backside on it. Perhaps he felt a proprietary relationship to it, an affinity with it, and could do as he liked. 

My docent dictum, “Touch with your eyes, not with your hands,” went out the window. I smiled.

Joanne Pateman is a regular contributor of “Guestwords.” She lives in Southampton.

I don’t play tennis. I don’t golf. I burn easily. Even with a hat and an S.P.F. of 30 on my face and my surfeit of sunglasses, still I freckle and burn. And mosquitoes always make a beeline to my elbows and ankles.

I am retired. My hobbies are limited to things indoors. Of course, I write. You know me from here, “Guestwords,” “my occasional column,” as I refer to it when I want to come across as a serious writer.

But I have lately discovered bridge. You heard it: bridge.

I grew up watching my parents playing canasta and poker and even mah-jongg. I would sit in the living room in Brooklyn, fresh from my bath, my hair still wet, in pajamas, and watch my parents play games on a card table. Smoking. And betting. And the whole thing — mostly the clack-clack-clacking of the mah-jongg tiles, one bam, two cracks — stays with me. My mom and dad seemed the most serene and focused and pleasant while playing games on a card table.

In my early 20s, I found gin rummy and played with a solid group of friends every Sunday afternoon. And lost $40. Or won $15. Or broke even. I even had a poker group (I was terrible at poker), and during one night, after losing $120, I left for home and found a $50 parking ticket on the windshield of my car. And this was 1970! What can $170 be in 2015 dollars? At least a grand.

I like playing cards. Solitaire was something I played often, even obsessively, as a kid. But I’m not a kid anymore. A fairly recent retiree looking around for ways to fill my days, I found bridge and went online and found a link to a bridge club in New York’s East 50s. For $25, you can sit and play for a couple of hours and learn.

I Kindled some bridge books and figured out a bit about bidding and conventions, but there’s nothing like playing to learn the game. 

I frequent this uptown bridge club every Tuesday morning and every Friday afternoon, and I feel like a kid again. At 67, I am among the youngest members in the crowd! Except for the patient guys who supervise the playing — a funny, self-effacing, self-professed bridge nerd in his 30s and another instructor, a sweet, edgy Asian guy who recently colored the top of his head platinum. He seems to be somewhere in his late 20s. 

But everyone else in the room is 100. Or 85. Or anyway older than me — one of the reasons I like it. (Even though I’m glad I’m not young anymore, to borrow from a lovely song from “Gigi.”)

But I also like it because it’s a great distraction. You really need to concentrate when you play bridge. You really need to pay attention.

The bidding is one thing. Conventions, as they are called, abound — you can bid clubs when you don’t have a single club. Of course, if your partner doesn’t know the conventions, he, or, most likely, she will want to club you over the noggin for falsely bidding clubs.

There are conventions named after people, ordinary people, who decide an unnatural bid will offer your partner more information about your hand. (It’s endlessly confusing.)

And then there’s the play. Difficult! You agree to a contract, an agreement to take a certain number of tricks, and you struggle to figure out how. Luckily, the bridge club I attend is basically for beginners-slash-intermediate players. So I am as awful at it as anyone else.

My partner, Mona, a gorgeous grandmother with a sexy, indeterminate accent, loves the game, and we relate to each other in all the mistakes we make. So it is fun. And you do meet people.

Mona lives in the Time Warner Center and once a week arranges a game with a small group in the game room of that glorious building. The nerd instructor we have come to love and look up to shows up, and maybe a fourth. They are private lessons in a posh, posh place.

(I love walking into the Time Warner Center. The game room, a large apartment-like dwelling with a kitchen and a plush conference room, is available to all well-heeled tenants and also features drop-dead views of Central Park from the 51st floor. Okay, I’m superficial.)

But the club itself! Jam-packed with people at all times of day and night, it is the real experience. 

I know that memory is a quality that recedes as the years pile on, but here, at this bridge club, you really get to see it firsthand over hands dealt. Ten times during the course of play, someone asks: “What’s the contract again?” “What’s trump?” “Who dealt?”

The repartee is also fairly interesting. Like the day an opponent, an older man wearing a hearing aid, looked at the bracelet I was wearing. An Hermes bracelet, with an “H” insignia — my first name’s initial, if you are paying close attention, is H.

“That’s a nice bracelet,” he leaned in to me and said.

I said, “It’s Hermes.”

He said, “What?”

“Hermes,” I repeated, louder. “Hermes!” (Okay, I’m pretentious, too.)

“Oh,” he said. “I’m so sorry you have MS.”

You’re only young once. Or, when I was an advertising writer, I tried to write a line for a line of anti-aging moisturizers: “You’re Only Young Twice.” But it never ran, and it is totally irrelevant to the story, I was just itching for a quick reference to my pre-retirement, pre-bridge life. . . .

And when you find yourself pushing 70, and find yourself not playing tennis or golf, your life turns to:

“One diamond.”

“One heart.”

You gotta have a heart to appreciate the experience of discovering bridge — and the discovery of meeting new people, people of a certain age.

An inspiring age. One that’s fun, delightful, daffy, and annoying.

Hy Abady, late of Amagansett, is recently out with a new book, “Back in The Star Again Again! Further Stories From the East End. And Beyond.”

Donald Trump says he would be “God’s greatest jobs president.” So far, the candidate has focused on renegotiating trade agreements, would have stopped Ford from building its new $2.5 billion factory in Mexico, and would have retaliated against China’s recent currency devaluation.

Regardless of whether this would work perfectly, Americans know Trump as a first-rate entrepreneur and businessman. They have legitimate expectations that Trump, at the least, would build an ecosystem that would foster and mentor their entrepreneurial aspirations; secondarily, he would have the best chance to drive the economy and jobs.

Many nonaffluent Americans know that a redistribution of wealth, such as Hillary Clinton’s proposal to increase capital gains taxes, is less likely to increase their standard of living than an increase in the economic pie for everyone. So, candidates must immerse themselves in ways to stimulate entrepreneurship and dramatically and quickly increase our gross domestic product and jobs.

I have been advocating the following silver bullet for the economy for several years. Company balance sheets have an estimated $10 trillion in liquid assets that could be put to work voluntarily, without government involvement or political partisanship, in the following win-win-win ways:

Help employees buy and rent homes.

Assist small companies seeking financing, especially suppliers and clients.

Finance public-private infrastructure investments, such as repairing highways, bridges, pipes, train systems, and schools.

Invest in solar and other alternatives to fossil fuels.

Today, home ownership is at the lowest level since 1994, with new housing starts off by 40 percent. Consequently, home building is down to 2 percent of G.D.P. from 6 percent. Banks remain very conservative on mortgage lending, and developers are afraid to build middle-income apartment houses because of a lack of renters who can show an adequate history of income and yet collectively have $1 trillion in student debt.

Companies know their employees better than banks do and have much to gain by helping employee living conditions. Likewise, no one can better project the future of their suppliers and customers, so providing them with financing is a good bet in many ways.

Putting to work some of the trillions of dollars sitting relatively idly in company bank and securities accounts — if not needed for acquisitions and stock buyback programs — would be a free-enterprise solution to our most important economic and social challenges.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, our recent prosperity presidents, governed during a dramatic increase in available capital after the U.S. Labor Department ruled in 1980 that pension funds had to diversify their portfolios away from just publicly traded securities into private company investments. The venture capital industry took off, funding whole new industries in computers, telecommunications, and biotech, and new low-tech ideas, such as big-box retailing (e.g., Staples) and competitors to the Postal Service (e.g., FedEx). Other alternative investment vehicles were basic economy drivers, such as real estate.

By the mid-1980s, Reagan could observe it was “the age of the entrepreneur.” Business schools created courses on entrepreneurship, and initial public offerings, which were virtually nonexistent in the 1970s, emerged and liquefied the venture capital portfolios.

Clinton’s term in office fed off this equity capital and hit the technology jackpot through cellphones and the Internet, with productivity increases that would never be fully measured.

In 2016, presidential hopefuls must focus on the federal funding of pure technology research that is too speculative for the private sector, as we appear to be on the verge of another hyper-tech era in areas such as biotechnology, robotics, metallurgy, nanotechnology, and new uses of the Internet. We cannot forget that the Internet was developed by America’s Department of Defense.

More urgent for our economy, however, and crucial for the millions of non-tech workers who are unemployed or underemployed, we need win-win-win help from corporations that can provide a new source of capital.

Americans who yearn for a Reagan-Clinton booming economy should concentrate on finding a president who sees the need to develop new strategies to tap underutilized financial resources for low-tech businesses especially, and who appreciates high tech, too.

Political commentators apparently have such cushy jobs and such a static sense of things that they cannot understand why jobs, the economy, and an attack on lobbyists are a primary concern of so many voters, or why the essence of Trump is not entertainer, where The Huffington Post still has him, but entrepreneur, or why Bernie Sanders is a savior, not a socialist, for many Democrats who lack economic security.

Politicians, like all Americans, have become jaded in thinking there could be a way to substantially increase our economic pie quickly, except for Trump’s focus on our international trade. They do not search for broad, innovative ideas based on what worked before.

There is a silver bullet for the U.S. economy — within our past, our borders, and our will!

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.

When I first came to the Hamptons in the summer of 1981, Tina Fredericks, who died in May at age 93, was the pooh-bah of East End real estate agents. “Realtor to the Stars”: So she anointed herself in her business ads, and so she was. The impression, widely held and not discouraged by Tina, was that she was the Queen Bee, and the rest were drones. It was more or less true.

I had rented (not through Tina) a house in Water Mill: a grand old shingled, veranda-ed, three-story, 12-room, post-Victorian wreck looking out upon a broad greensward that sloped tenderly down to Mecox Bay. There were massive trees. There were rushes at water’s edge. There were swans gliding. There were evocations of Merchant & Ivory. The rent was $12,000 for the summer.

Midsummer, the owners came to confer with me. They were getting a divorce and were putting the house up for sale. Since I was currently in residence, it was being offered to me first. They were embarrassed to tell me the asking price. “Things are getting crazy out here,” the husband said, red-faced. The price was $325,000.

“Buy it!” Tina hissed in my ear as we stood on the veranda gazing upon all there was to gaze upon, which was plenty. “The land alone is worth twice as much.”

Of course, the land alone, in the bittersweet fullness of time, would come to be worth more like — I’m guessing here, perhaps absurdly lowballing it — 10 times as much. Even Tina could not have anticipated the full dimensions of the tulip-bulb craze that would sweep over these golden acres. But she was, in her moment, ahead of the game. She had the eye. She had the nose.

I needed a 12-room house like I needed a hernia. Anyway, it was impossible. I had neither the means nor the spirit. I was recently widowed and still a bit of a basket case, beset by ghosts that prowled the Provincetown house, a dear, decrepit behemoth smack on the harbor, that my husband and I had owned. I wanted to sell it, I didn’t want to sell it, and in the throes of that indecision had taken the advice of friends, who urged a change of scene and found me this place in Water Mill.

I called Tina. There were connections. Way back I had worked for The New York Times, where her then-husband, Rick Fredericks, the Sunday picture editor, had been my pal and colleague. Now she and I met, hit it off, and fell easily into the habit of dining together often. We had mellow dinners in the lovely Georgica Road carriage house (purchased by Tina and Rick in 1950 for $6,500) that was her home and office. We sat rocking, nursing drinks, and trading intimate war stories on my dandy veranda-by-the-bay (which she never visited without sighing, “The land alone . . .”).

Land was much on her mind that season. Land was always much on Tina’s mind, but especially that season. She and a partner were developing something new on the Hamptons landscape: an ambitious amalgam of co-op units and private homes, all spread over 150 rolling acres that had once been a dairy farm.

That summer, her vision existed mostly on paper. By the next, it was almost complete. I saw it often, traveling east along Route 27. It looked like a period etching, a pastoral dream incarnate. Horses peacefully grazing in a huge meadow that sloped upward from the road. At the top of the incline, the silver crowns of two vintage silos gleaming in the sun. Big open spaces. Clusters of co-op units discreetly hidden from one another by the lay of the land, a touch of the Japanese aesthetic, a tad of the potato barn in the way they hugged the ground.

Condos and co-ops, though common enough in the city, were still a rarity on the East End. “It’s the future!” Tina said, waving an arm as though to summon the future now. “Somebody else takes care of the pool! Somebody else takes care of the tennis court! Somebody else takes care of the grounds!”

I was still not in the market, and Tina knew it. “Oh, I wish . . . ,” I would say, and she would say, “Well, maybe someday. . . .” But by the time someday arrived, my life had taken several different turns, and I was no longer spending summers in the Hamptons.

In 2000 I was remarried, to a man who had himself been widowed. With his late wife he had owned a vacation house in Springs, which was traded for a house on the Connecticut shore, to be closer to their children, which was traded for no house at all because, he said, the hell with it. Enough of the groundskeeping and the deck repairing and the tennis-court maintaining. No more houses.

And sitting there in our co-op on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I heard a bell. Ping. Or maybe a voice. A remembrance of a voice long past, coming softly, seductively, through the ether: “Somebody else takes care of the pool! Somebody else takes care of the tennis court! Somebody else. . . .”

Et cetera. Also, eureka.

“Uh. How about a co-op?” I said.

So we came and we saw and he liked and we bought, and I have never since had any cause to beware the 30-year-old wish that came true.

Tina was long retired by then, and ailing. So she never knew, which I regret. And now she is gone and sometimes, particularly in those hours when we are sitting idle-handed on our little patio and watching somebody else cut the grass, I find myself thinking of her. Salut, Tina, I think, lifting a glass. You had the nose.

Martha Weinman Lear’s most recent book is “Echoes of Heartsounds,” published last year.

David Sedaris has gotten me through some pretty tough times. Whether it’s divorce, death, or disaster, I read “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and know that everything’s going to be okay. So I was thrilled to hear he would appear at the John Drew Theater, directly across from the library where I work. As luck would have it, the show was sold out and I didn’t have a ticket. Being Facebook friends with the wife of the theater’s artistic director, I figured my best tactic was blatant begging.

I had been their son’s nursery school teacher and he had adored me, Kate always telling the story that I was his first love. He’s in high school now, but she always mentions it whenever I see them, which I’m sure he really appreciates. Nevertheless, I was an important part of his life, so they owed me. Kate couldn’t come through with a ticket but kindly invited me to the autograph session before the show.

I walked into the theater lobby, and there he was. A slight young man was kneeling worshipfully before him, talking earnestly. The kneeling posture gave me pause. Kneeling or bowing is a sign of reverence or submission. For David Sedaris, this was totally deserved. But should I, must I, kneel?

Luckily, Kate was right there and distracted me from this dilemma by handing me a Post-it, instructing me to write exactly how I wanted David Sedaris to autograph my book. This was a big decision, so I discussed it with everyone else waiting in line, letting go of my natural shyness and forming an instant bond because we were all meeting David Sedaris together!

The woman behind me quickly decided to have him write, “You can’t kill the Rooster,” which was clever, because by quoting a line from his book he would know she had read it. That would impress him, but I wanted something more personal. All I had come up with was “To Lisa” when the kneeling young man suddenly stood up and it was my turn.

I started off by telling him that his books have gotten me through tough times, I always recommend them to library patrons, and “Jesus Shaves” is the best story ever written. “Except for the Bible,” I said loudly, for the benefit of the minister who was next in line. I discreetly nodded in her direction so David wouldn’t think I was a religious fanatic. He seemed concerned, saying, “Why is there a minister here?” But after I whispered, “I know her and she’s cool,” he seemed to relax. He was really paying attention to me, so I decided to tell him my library school story.

I prefaced it by saying, “I’m going to tell you something, but don’t take this the wrong way.” That really got his attention. His eyes widened in alarm, as in, “Is this the deranged fan I’ve been waiting for all these years?”

I noted his reaction but bravely continued: I had gone back to graduate school in my 40s to earn a master’s degree in library science at Queens College. Always the good student, I sat at the front of the class (until my last semester when I was so burnt-out from working a full-time job while commuting to Queens that I sat in the back row with the smokers, who made snide comments and took frequent breaks). I participated in class discussions, but because of my shyness my contributions were always well-planned-out comments of a professional nature.

One night, the class was assigned to read humorous essays, one of the authors being David Sedaris. This was exciting. We were going to discuss the brilliant comedic genius of my favorite author! A bonus of the assignment was that I had already read all of his books numerous times, so it was going to be an easy week.

The following week, the class discussion began with a student complaining that she really didn’t think David Sedaris was all that funny, calling him “whiney.” Other students chimed in with agreement. I was outraged. Something rose up within me and I let them have it. “What? What is wrong with you people?” I blasted. “David Sedaris is a masterful and witty satirist . . . he is not whiney! Come on, he is so funny! What about his mom, Sharon? When she locked all five kids out of the house during a snowstorm and they tried to get the youngest sister to lie down in the road and get run over so Sharon would let them back in? That’s funny!”

The room went quiet, stunned into silence. The professor surely must have agreed with me, but she diplomatically smoothed it over and we moved on. (When telling David the story, I left out the word “whiney,” feeling that it was just too hurtful. When replaying it in my mind later, I realized he totally could’ve handled it.)

What my classmates — and other people who read one or two of his stories and then make a judgment — don’t understand is that it’s not just that we like his stories and think he’s funny. We love him. We know him and his siblings and his parents, Sharon and Lou; he’s let us into his life and laid it bare. So, sure, some of his stories might fall a little flat, especially the earlier ones where he was on crystal meth and in the throes of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But he had told us about all that and we understood and forgave him, loving him all the more for his humanness.

My fear of hurting his feelings because some crazy people/losers don’t think he is funny was assuaged when he responded to my story with a piece of advice. “What works for me when people don’t think something is funny is this: I say, ‘Why are you being so difficult?’ ” We both laughed. I was laughing with David Sedaris! I knew the people waiting in line were jealous.

Then he told me a story of his own. He once met a young aspiring writer who had told his English professor that the author he most wanted to emulate was David Sedaris. The professor advised, “Perhaps you should set your sights a bit higher.” We laughed again.

I didn’t want to leave him, we had a lot more to talk about, but the line was building and I could see others were getting anxious. So I bade him goodbye, telling him how much it meant for me to meet him and thanking him for being such an important part of my life.

I immediately went to my new friends still in line so we could all read together what he had written: To Lisa, I’m so happy you’re a librarian. David Sedaris.

Lisa Michne, a librarian at the East Hampton Library, grew up in Bridgehampton and lives in Springs.

David Sedaris will appear at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater on July 27 at 8 p.m.

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.

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.