Long Island from the beginning has had a close relationship with England. On Dec. 24 the United States and Britain celebrated 200 years of unbroken peace.

The peace treaty, the Treaty of Ghent, came after a long period of hostilities. We were on the same side during the French and Indian War, when the wise Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder chased the French out of North America. But as soon as Prime Minister Lord North and George III tried to make the colonies pay for their own protection, the American Revolution was on.

Its end was not the end of hostilities with the mother country. James Madison declared war on Britain in 1812 because British Orders in Council made it harder for the United States to trade with France, and because the British Navy was seizing (“impressing”) sailors on colonial ships and putting them on Navy ships. The British ended the trade restrictions, but not impressment.

After Britain invaded and burned the White House and Capitol, it became clear that this was a war that neither country could afford — Britain was richer but it had been spending a lot fighting Napoleon. In the fall of 1813, Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign minister, offered to negotiate. The two countries picked neutral Ghent in eastern Flanders as the venue.

The United States team was led by John Quincy Adams, son of a president and himself destined to become president. Henry Clay played the role of hawk, or “bad cop.” The rest of the team was Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, the Federalist James A. Bayard, and Jonathan Russell, who was U.S. chargé d’affaires in Paris. It took the Americans six weeks or more to communicate with Washington, D.C., so they were negotiating largely independently to restore territory to what it had been before the war, the “status quo ante bellum.”

The British team was led by Lord Castlereagh and Lord Bathurst, secretary for war and the colonies, but they did not attend the talks. Instead, a less skilled admiralty lawyer, Williams Adams, an impressments expert, Admiral Lord Gambier, and the undersecretary for war and the colonies, Henry Goulburn, pursued a goal of “uti possidetis” — each side keeps what it had won militarily.

The outcome of the treaty was favorable for the United States, perhaps because the war was going well for the Americans at the time the treaty was signed.

The Americans had been losing early on, but Lt. Gen. Sir George Prevost was faced in Plattsburgh with a strong New York and Vermont militia and U.S. Army regulars under the command of Brig. Gen. Alexander Macomb. Failing to take Lake Champlain, the British fled north after the battle. Next, Fort McHenry in Baltimore withstood a severe attack and inspired the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

News of these two battles was the last information that negotiators in Ghent received.

The British lost their goal of making the Native American lands in the state of Ohio and in the territories of Indiana and Michigan a reserve that would be a buffer to protect Canada from American annexation. They got none of the other aims of their invasion.

On Dec. 24 the negotiators agreed on the 3,000-word treaty. After approval by the two governments, hostilities ended and “all territory, places, and possessions whatsoever, taken by either party from the other during the war” were restored to what they had been before the war.

Donald E. Graves, a Canadian historian and War of 1812 expert, concludes that what Americans lost on the battlefield, “they made up for at the negotiating table.” Although the United States never got the British to promise not to impress American sailors, with hostilities in Europe ended this ceased to be a concern.

It took a while after the signing of the treaty before the combatants got word, however. The British attacked New Orleans on Jan. 8, 1815, with a large army. It was overwhelmed by a smaller and less experienced American force under Gen. Andrew Jackson in the greatest U.S. victory in the war. News of the treaty and the outcome in New Orleans reached a delighted American public at about the same time.

The War of 1812 greatly damaged the Long Island economy. A blockade was maintained at Gardiner’s Bay that led to several clashes between American and British vessels. Many vessels were hidden in inland harbors on Long Island or on Carmans River in Connecticut.

The American privateer Governor Tompkins captured a number of British ships. On its way back to New York, the ship confronted an English brig of war and had its bowsprit shot away and five men killed or wounded. New York City was blockaded at Sandy Hook, so the Tompkins tried to make New London. Seeing the British fleet waiting there, the Tompkins changed course and went through Plum Gut, then a narrow rocky strait between Plum Island and Orient Point, where the brig could not follow. Daniel Winters of Westhampton guided the Tompkins to safety in Gardiner’s Bay.

A big loss for the British occurred on Jan. 16, 1815, three weeks after the Treaty of Ghent. The 22-gun British sloop of war Sylph, with a crew of 121 men, got lost and went ashore off Shinnecock Point. Volunteer rescuers gathered, but the high wind, heavy surf, and a blizzard prevented a lifeboat from being launched in a timely way. By the time it got to the wreck, only one officer and five men remained to be rescued. A letter from the British Admiralty with the Suffolk County Historical Society says the Sylph lost at least 115 men, including the captain and 10 other officers.

The 21 bodies that floated ashore are buried near Sugar Loaf at Shinnecock Hills, and the wreck is commemorated by a tablet in Southampton’s St. Andrew’s Dune Church. The border and wheel above it are made of red cedar from the vessel’s wrecked timbers.

The Treaty of Ghent has held up for 200 years. But it did not imply an immediate “Special Relationship,” just a cessation of hostilities. In fact, many Irish Catholics opposed the U.S. entry on the side of Britain in the Great War. The famed Special Relationship was really not cemented until the threat of Hitler brought together the United States and Britain, first with Lend-Lease and then with the U.S. declaration of war in 1941.

John Tepper Marlin is president of Boissevain Books. He has lived in Springs since 1981.

A story published in The East Hampton Star on Nov. 27, “Lawyer’s Death Reveals System Failures,” about emergency medical services in the town following the death of Tom Twomey, illustrates the tip of the iceberg. Such stories have played out in the past and will continue to in the future until we implement better solutions.

Simply throwing more money into first responder programs is fiscally irresponsible. System design is a key aspect of turning financial resources into service. The problem lies in that each of the 101 ambulance and first response services in Suffolk functions independently.

Disturbingly, the lack of funding is often cited as a limitation in designing a better system and coordination at a regional level. Yet a 2007 New York State Office of the Comptroller report says that revenue collected by special districts is considerable.

Funding relies heavily on the tax base of the community and contributes to the already high property taxes in the region. This is ironic since insurance companies will often pay for emergency transport, yet all but one known not-for-profit ambulance company in Suffolk bills for its services. Fire districts are not permitted to bill for their services; ambulance districts can.

This excuse cannot be used to continue leaving money on the table that could go toward establishing a more economically efficient model. Excuses such that patients will be discouraged from calling 911 so they can avoid a co-pay are flawed. It would be expected that an emergency department visit would generate a co-pay, as would physician services.

Nor can we continue to hide behind the excuse of “home rule.” Home rule allows governance at the local level. Ambulance service governance is generally at the fire district and town level. Even at the town level, however, town councils generally do not take a role in providing oversight or coordination of the individual agencies.

The culture must change. Agency and political leaders must support systemwide modernization. Change that will capitalize on economies of scale, such as shared municipal services, is necessary to prevent future E.M.S. system failures. Metrics must be established, data collected, and ambulance services held accountable to performance standards.

Several agencies have proved their ability to serve their communities well, but may not have the strength in all three sides of the triangle that are essential measurements of an E.M.S. system: clinical sophistication, response time reliability, and economic efficiency. Many get two right, but achieving all three is the exception. Shortening one or two sides of the triangle may give a false appearance of competency when viewed from a favorable angle.

It may be better to look at each of these agencies not as micro systems, but as individual stations, part of a larger system. In many cases, it is not the individual station that has failed us, but the system as a whole. A well-performing system relies on all links in the chain to function well. We have a system with many broken links.

Lacking is the coordination among the very dedicated men and women who provide emergency medical services. It is time that we recognize a more efficient E.M.S. delivery model that includes improved agency coordination of first responders and ambulance response vehicles. Staffing could be done by both volunteer and career personnel, but integral to coordination is effective communications, command and control of vehicles, and human resources, among other key components.

Resource allocation needs to be managed based on demand, not availability. While change will not bring back Mr. Twomey or those who have died waiting for an ambulance, the little data we have demonstrates that we are better than we were in 2007. There has been at least a tripling of cases of individuals surviving to be discharged alive from the hospital after suffering an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Such accomplishments would not have been possible without the grassroots efforts of the thousands of dedicated volunteer and career E.M.S. personnel, emergency departments, and intensive-care units throughout Suffolk County. But major gaps still exist.

In October, New York State and Suffolk emergency agencies responded swiftly and collectively to the Ebola outbreak in answer to an order issued by the acting state health commissioner, Howard Zucker. While I am not minimizing concerns at home about the Ebola threat, we have not had one individual with Ebola in Suffolk County. We have a much bigger public health emergency regionally — a fragmented and inefficient E.M.S. system.

While protocols are in place to transfer a call to a neighboring ambulance service if a crew cannot respond, data are unavailable to measure compliance. It is essential that leadership at the district level be part of the process, but coordination must happen at a higher level of government.

This is a call for our leaders to come together at the district, town, and county levels to implement sweeping improvements in our E.M.S. system. Your life may depend upon it!

Carl S. Goodman is certified in emergency medicine and emergency medical services by the American Board of Emergency Medicine. A Mount Sinai resident, he has been both a volunteer and a paid E.M.S. provider in Suffolk County and elsewhere for 30 years.

Because of the big storm the other day, the howling winds driving sheets of rain, the ocean beach has written a new chapter for itself. The straggly brown ribbons of seaweed mixed with debris have been swept away, the deeply grooved ruts of crisscrossing truck tracks have been smoothed over, and most footprints are gone.

I’m marveling at clearly visible miles of low-tide, hard-packed glistening sand, brand new and shiny as the sun begins to hover over the day’s freshly painted scene before me. But I can see something is wrong up ahead on the shore.

The hundreds, maybe thousands, of gulls I spot in the near distance are flocked together on the sand, not the water, but they’re giving all the signals of frenzied feeding. They’re wheeling, diving, pecking, and fighting from just a few inches up in the air and then setting down while gobbling things I can’t see yet, then they are up again.

As I get closer, I notice that they’re hoisting aloft bloody bits and pieces of what I first think are scraps of just-cleaned fish jettisoned overboard by the gill-net crew aboard the commercial fishing boat so near shore I could almost reach out and touch it. But now I’m right upon the gulls and I notice what they’re fighting over and eating . . . whole baby bluefish, snappers, tons of them, and most are only 8 to 10 inches long.

All the usual clues are here before me: undersized, unmarketable fish, gill nets, a commercial boat still present and setting out a new string of nets as it slowly motors away. This is not the first time or place I’ve drifted into a fish-dumping scenario in my many years as a beachcomber and fishing enthusiast. There was a time during the fall fishing season years ago when I tried to catch every sunrise and sunset and every change of tide; so crazed was I to catch the big, elusive stripers that I spent many an observant hour on the beaches from South­ampton to Amagansett.

After witnessing many scenes like the one this morning, I have been both angry and sad, outraged and offended, and much less enthusiastic about killing fish myself. As I watch the gill netters’ craft smokily chug out past the breakers, I try to face my own history of hooking fish and perhaps being wasteful of such magnificent animals.

In the late 1970s, when I started surfcasting in the ocean off Southampton, bluefish were so abundant that there was no size or catch limit. Striped bass numbers were in an ever-spiraling downward trend, but they were what we were all after, commercial and sportfishermen alike. They were the money fish for some and the gourmet, hard-to-catch prize for others.

It was primarily bluefish, however, that chased our wooden plugs and silver spoon lures from September to December, and it was the blues we let pile up behind us in ever higher mounds; mounds that sometimes I found still on the beach the next day, abandoned for the gulls to eat. For years, before I learned to check my fervor, my heap of dead and dying fish was much more than I could eat or reasonably give away. Having to actively search for hours in my car, door to door, and by phone for willing recipients to give my huge surplus to made me finally realize I had to stop my overkill.

I decided that my transformation into a conservator should begin by unlearning most of the fishing tips I was taught as a child. I would not sharpen hooks anymore, in fact I would smash down all the barbs with pliers in order to back out a hook easily and release the fish. I would not keep the line so taught anymore between the rod and the fish — if it slipped the hook and got away, that was okay now. I would no longer stockpile every fish I captured. I would gently handle them as best I could while removing the lure and try to ensure that all but the bleeding, foul-hooked ones would deservedly re-enter their sudsy world in exchange for the valiant fight they put up.

Eventually, over the years and up to the current day, this alteration of my fishing methods and of my constant pursuit of sportfishing has led to my being able to watch contentedly as others reel in monster blues and huge bass — perfectly happy to be simply an unarmed observer and enjoying the ocean and the beach for all the myriad other delights they have to offer.

Now I stockpile fish and their pursuers, ocean waves and the gulls flying over them, and the sand dunes, with their always changing shadows, in a different way. My instrument of capture now is solely my camera.

Florrie Morrisey lives in Southampton Village.

My wife never saw an owl. She would mention this at odd times, fairly regularly. Not just when she was looking at trees in the woods or trees on the street or trees through the car window. And not just when she was refurbishing birdhouses or rehydrating hummingbird feeders or referencing a book of North American birds. She would mention it when putting on her blue snow boots or scrambling eggs, when waiting in line to send a package to our son or get handed a bag of popcorn without butter.

It had become such a longing in her life that for Christmas I gave her a soft, overpriced saw-whet owl to hang on the tree. It could have been seen as a sad substitute — Christmas is always a touchy time — but she liked it fine, and hung it around eye level, somewhere above the yellow submarine and below the tin angel.

On Dec. 26, driving home from a dinner with friends, turning into the driveway, just before midnight, I heard my wife whisper excitedly, “Look. An owl. Shhhhh. Don’t move.” Sitting on the grass in front of our house was a saw-whet owl. He was looking in our direction, alertly, as if he had been waiting for us to come home, like a family pet. My wife turned off the car radio to see better. The owl swiveled his head to the left to look at something as we looked at him. “It’s so small. Can he see us? They’re nocturnal, right? Turn off the lights. Is it a baby or just a little owl? Oooh. It’s so adorable. An owl. An owl.” (Yes, she can whisper in italics.)

The owl was six or seven inches high, white and brown downy, with a black bill and big black eyes ringed with deep yellow sclerae, and he was very still, except for that single sudden swivel of his head. “What is he doing on the ground?” my wife whispered. “Is he hurt? Awww. Turn the lights back on. Maybe he needs help. Or maybe he’s eating something. Do you see anything? Don’t move. Shhhh.”

We sat there, mesmerized by the saw-whet in front of our house until a truck rumbled by and spooked the little owl. After a labored, wobbly liftoff, he was soon flying across the road and through the boughs and into the night. There was just a sliver of moon. It illuminated nothing.

In the house, my wife went directly to her guide book and read aloud other names by which the northern saw-whet owl is called: Acadian owl, sparrow owl, farmland owl, Queen Charlotte owl, and little nightbird. And then she sat there, in a shaft of wonder, looking at something I could not see. She will never say she never saw an owl again.

For Christmases of the future, I am going to shop for her with even greater care, not to say tremulousness, for there are powers at work here, and I don’t understand them. And I have less than a year.

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

Living together is an art, not a mere scientific or mechanical adjustment. All the mechanizations of all the social engineers will not help a heterogeneous people to live together in brotherly, peaceable, happy relationship unless the individuals of society begin early, practice diligently, and learn to delight in the art of living with other peoples and different races.

In the United States we have the representatives of all races, but the major distinction in thought, and often in practice, is made between the vast “black” race and the vaster “white” race. This distinction is not biological; it is sociological and historical.

If the problem lay in biology, it would be hopeless for us, for it could be solved only by evolution, and evolution may take a million million years. In sociology we may take relatively short cuts through education, acquaintanceship, cooperation, social reaction. This is simple, but it is difficult, for we are hindered by habits, prejudices, selfish interests, and fear — and the worst of these is fear.

We need first acquaintanceship. People do not get acquainted through caste relationships. The master does not know the slave. The boss does not know the laborer; the employer does not know the employee as a man and fellow-citizen. The relationship of “inferior” and “superior” stands in the way of fraternal acquaintanceship.

Whenever two groups are handicapped by caste-customs, the strong­er and advantaged group can never understand the weaker and disadvantaged group as well as the weak understand the strong. This is not due to any superior virtue in the weak but is due to their necessity: The weak must understand the strong; it is a condition of the survival of the weak.

Let us take Georgia for an example: Cultured, intelligent, and refined white homes in Georgia will be well known to colored people, but the homes of the poor whites, the uncultured and disorderly, will be unknown to colored people. Now let us get at the other end of this social telescope and take a look and everything will be just reversed. The better, the more cultured, and the more orderly a black man’s home is in Georgia, the surer we can be that no white man ever entered it. But the low, uncultured, disorderly homes of black people in Georgia are almost certain to be well known to white people, and to very influential white people: the sheriff, the chief of police, the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the readers of all the newspapers.

Neither race is to be blamed for this abnormality — it is nobody’s deliberate planning — it is in the very nature of segregated relationships. In such relationships the strong will control the weak and will therefore deal chiefly, almost exclusively, with the undesirable qualities and elements of the weak, while the weaker and poorer people will serve the strong and will therefore develop contacts with the economically better off and generally more cultured and refined sections of the strong.

But while we cannot be blamed for the inevitable results of a given system, we are to be blamed if we do not seek to alter the system and thereby secure better results. A dominant race will have an almost 100-percent knowledge of the crime and criminals of a subject race, because the dominant race will run all the courts and jails; but the dominant race may have an almost zero knowledge of the law-abiding persons in the weaker group, but that the others just have not been caught yet.

This is the only possible apology for the ridiculous statement of impatient and exasperated whites, who have dealt only with Negro thieves, when they say heatedly that there are no honest Negroes; when they have dealt only with ignorant blacks, that there are no intelligent Negroes; when they have had relations only with black prostitutes, that there are no colored women who are virtuous and chaste. If color-caste is capable of such vitiation of human relations, color-caste ought to be destroyed, and men of the same cultural levels ought to be recognized as men and granted the privileges of their culture.

In analyzing the art of living together, it is well to know that a human will like people better when he does something for them and hate them most when he does most against them. It is not the sentiment that causes the deed, it is the deed that causes the sentiment. If we want to like people, let us start doing good to them; if we wish to give nourishment to our hatred, let us feed it with deeds of ill against the objects of the hatred. Hate, in and by itself, is an empty illusion that would tend to vanish; to be kept in the semblance of life, it must be continually fed on the substance of deeds.

Let us see: There are two men in Illinois who are equally indifferent to Negro education, but being solicited, the one gives a thousand dollars toward Negro education and the other gives nothing. Subsequently let both of these men hear the same violent attack on Negro education. The one who gave will feel outraged by such an attack: “Negro education is all right, otherwise I would never have been such a fool as to give my money toward it.” While the one who refused to give will feel justified: “Good! I knew it was not stinginess and the lack of generosity that caused me to refuse to give, it was my good sense about the problem.” So much for the man who refuses to do good.

That explains why those who have for over two generations supported Negro education in America are practically 100-percent defenders of that cause, while some who have opposed it have become more desperate and violent in their opposition and will not acknowledge even when they are convinced. The man who fights a good cause must continually show that the cause was wrong in order to show that he is right.

White people have often marveled at the phenomenon that the American Negro, enslaved and oppressed, has not quite developed the hatred against his oppressors that some of his oppressors have developed against him. This has been erroneously set down as a contrast in racial traits, but it is simply the differences in spiritual need as between the perpetrator and the victim of a wrong. The one who is so unfortunate as to do a wrong has a far greater motive for developing hatred than has the unfortunate to whom that wrong is done; namely, the motive of self-justification.

Evidently, the more cooperation, the better understanding, and the better understanding, the better for living together. Cooperation brings acquaintanceship, and there is no substitute for acquaintanceship. No church creed, no bill of rights, no constitutional article, no wordy resolutions, and no pious prayers can ever be substituted for plain, old-fashioned acquaintanceship in the business of living together.

Segregation prevents or handicaps acquaintanceship. Therefore, no form of interracial segregation that it is practicable to avoid in a given community should ever be tolerated. An evil should not be allowed to spread; like slavery, race discrimination should be confined to its present boundaries and limitations until it can be destroyed.

Infinite patience is needed; sheer force can achieve little. In the present moment force cannot open the public schools of Georgia to colored children, but wisdom and foresight can prevent the closing of the public schools of New York to the children of any race.

This is an excerpt from a 1934 speech written in hopes of improving race relations in America. William Pickens was a member of the committee that founded the N.A.A.C.P. in 1909 and a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Yale University in 1904. Bill Pickens of Sag Harbor is his grandson.

I am led by two extracts of wisdom, both acquired while sitting on porches. From Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” From Charles Baudelaire: “Genius is childhood recovered at will.”

My intention this summer is to spend as much time as I can on a porch recovering this genius and this nature. Depending on how you see it, I have an advantage for this — a new daughter born in June. A week after she emerged, we left the gathering hum of New York City air-conditioners and were here on this porch that wraps around our small cottage in Lazy Point, Amagansett.

The timing of this is fortunate: My teacher’s vacation nearly matches my wife’s maternity leave, which frames the entire summer. In the leafless days of still-windy March, we imagined what three months of time away would be like. I even thought of buying wind chimes to hang on the fire escape to up the anticipation.

But beyond this calendar coincidence, a deeper connection is growing. In our emergence from our respective wombs — my small, airless city apartment stuffed with emails, her viscous sac; in our afternoon sways in the hammock, and in our appreciation of being peacefully swaddled — we are emerging into the real world.

Every nap of hers offers a lesson. When I first take her onto my chest, she is all mouth, bobbing her little head and pecking at my sternum, slipping down the side of me, clenching, de-clenching, grunting, yawning, clenching, and wriggling dozens of new muscles to do it all again. Sometimes it takes walking a few lengths of the porch, sometimes singing, but then her 8 or 10 pounds (all of them!) settle into a puddle and the weight goes away, like sand that clings and dries into the whispers of the wind.

Her sleep is so deep on that porch she can fit the whole outside into the rhythm of her breathing. A gust of wind that blows the sea grass back, a truck hauling a house-worth of lumber, the distant whine of a leaf blower — that halo of her head is in its own land. Still, I don’t want to risk the journey to the kitchen and disturb this downy newness, so I can do nothing but sit and stare, and go through a de-clenching of my own.

I look at the line the tree trunk makes against the telephone pole, follow this down to the salvia I’m also trying to bring into life, which leads to the bumblebee, and along its wing into the woods across the street, where it disappears into the thorny twines, and the world becomes edgeless and unbounded, a continuous realm of lines waiting to be connected.

Eventually, she opens her eyes. Right now (we are told), she can see faces and checkerboard contrasts, but quite literally the scope of her vision grows by the day. Even the color of her eyes will change, from dark gray to another surprise. Of course, I have watched this all evolve with her sister, who will soon turn 3 and suddenly seems like a giant. She is all eyes now, hoping each dusk to go out and look for deer.

And so I put her on my shoulders and we sneak into the meadow across the way to look for anything moving. She brings a focus to this that I sometimes forget can happen. Deer are probably the only thing she is thinking about. At her request one night to go farther into the field, I nearly walked into a wild turkey. It jolted up with a horrible squawk and wide and unfamiliar wings and took a couple of steps right at us, perhaps protecting babies of her own.

It was a terrifying shock to the senses; I’m certain the moment was as new to me as it was to her. This meadow became not just a place to perhaps see a deer, but a vital habitat for lives otherwise known only from storybooks. I felt as small as I do walking on the beach in February.

But the biggest surprise of this summer, so far, has been how much things have actually slowed down with this addition of another child. True, there are more diapers and there is less sleep, but there is also more porch time, where the “inward and outward senses still truly [adjust] to each other.” Vacations like this are an anomaly; the aim is always to re-treat “normal life” with as much relaxed vigor as can be sustained. But with the baby now, we have another source of discoveries.

Since coming here a few weeks ago, she has begun to look and sound less pterodactylian. Still, her face sometimes gets that drunken daze you see outside the Memory Motel, and her brow furrows at the shock of this new world, but over all, she shows the milk of human kindness. Her wrinkled flesh is smoothing over, her dry skin is flaking off, she has the suggestion of hair. Things are better for everyone on the porch.

Tim Donahue is a high school English teacher and writer from New York City who comes frequently to his house in Lazy Point, Amagansett.

With all of the iPhones, iPads, tablets, laptops, and other devices teens have access to these days, you would think textbooks would be a thing of the past . . . right? Guess again. Carrying around heavy backpacks all day can be very detrimental for growing students, causing stress fractures in the back, inflammation of growth cartilage, and nerve damage in the neck and shoulders. Even with the advancements in technology, the burden of the backpack has not been lifted, in fact it has only increased.

As a senior at East Hampton High School, I’ve had to put up with the discomfort of backpacks nearly my whole academic life. I decided someone needed to say something. So I asked a bunch of my friends and their younger siblings who attended schools within the district whether they, or anyone they knew, struggled with back problems related to backpacks.

An (un)surprising majority had experience with back problems ranging from regular chiropractor visits to severe cases of progressing scoliosis, some even resulting in spinal surgery. You don’t need to be a scientist or doctor to see the effect that lugging backpacks has on us. We slouch, shuffle our feet, are slow to class, and use our desks to crack our backs more than anything else (just ask any high school student to explain the technique). These characteristics shouldn’t be chalked up as typical sullen teenage behavior; instead they should be recognized as one of the side effects of years of dealing with overweight backpacks.

The standard high school course requires students to transport at least one textbook back and forth between home and class. This does not include all of the handouts, class work, binders, folders, calculators, books, homework, notes, tests, quizzes, portfolios, and so on. Keep in mind that most binders, once filled, can weigh as much as, if not more than, the books. Over time the “heavy workload” really piles up, figuratively and literally.

During my junior year I began researching reports of overweight backpacks and their prominence in school systems across the country. It was interesting to learn how in recent years backpacks seemed to be getting heavier, causing more and more complaints from the student body despite the influx of technology intended to alleviate such issues. There were articles by doctors and parents all over the Internet about the severe problems that accompany overweight backpacks, but I could hardly find any information on the average weight of a backpack nowadays.

I had so many questions: How early are children being forced to lug their backpacks each day? Exactly how heavy is the average backpack? What about in my school district? I was curious. So in February of this year, with the approval of my principal, Adam Fine, I held my first-ever “Backpack Weigh-In” at my high school.

I arrived at school early one morning with a few of my good friends and set up a table in the front lobby along with posters, fliers, doughnuts (to encourage participation), and, most important, scales. Then the buses pulled up, opened their doors, and immediately students were pouring into the foyer. My friends and I stood near the table calling over our peers to have their bags weighed and in return receive a doughnut. Needless to say, all of the doughnuts vanished within seconds.

Even after the treats were gone, students still came up to the table curious about my project and shocked at the weight they hadn’t realized they were carrying around with them all the time. In the end I had weighed 100 backpacks. The results were astonishing. Doctors say that you should never carry more than 10 percent of your body weight for long periods of time. On the low end of the spectrum, students’ backpacks weighed a minimum of 10 percent of their body weight. Fewer than 20 students were either under, or met, the recommended 10 percent. The average weight was 19 pounds — almost double the recommended percentage.

On the high end, some bags were clocking in at 24, 27, even 30 pounds. Let me say that none of these students weighed anywhere near enough to be within the 10-percent parameters. This meant that about one-quarter of the 100 students were hauling almost triple the recommended amount.

The heaviest bag I weighed was that of a senior girl. She was a petite thing, around 5-foot-2, and when I asked her if she was interested in seeing how much her bag weighed she shrugged and let it drop to the floor with a loud thud. Since the bag was too big to fit on one of my bathroom scales, I asked for the assistance of my health teacher, who hooked it onto one of my scales that works using suspension. My teacher’s eyes popped out of his head as he gave the tiny girl a once-over and then showed me the number.

I turned and asked if she would tell me how much she weighed. At this point she was a little nervous, seeing that something had really grabbed ahold of my attention, but she replied that when she weighed herself the week before she was roughly 113 pounds. Her bag was 34 pounds — just over 30 percent of her body weight. I asked if she suffered from any back problems, and she explained that at the age of 16, almost two years ago, she began seeing a chiropractor regularly.

Amazed at these results, I presented them to Mr. Fine, who was also blown away. After some discussion we both agreed it would be interesting to do the same experiment at the other schools within the district. So at the end of May I met with Charles Soriano, the principal of the East Hampton Middle School, and Dennis Sullivan, the assistant principal of the John M. Marshall Elementary School, and arranged another two weigh-in sessions. Although doughnuts weren’t allowed to aid us in attracting volunteers, we were still able to round up a good 50 bags at the middle school and another 100 at the elementary school.

Again the results left us all slack-jawed and wide-eyed. At the middle school the average backpack weighed 14 pounds, and at the elementary school the average was 7 pounds. Again, just by looking at the students, you could clearly tell that they were beyond the healthy 10 percent. This means by the time some kids graduate from elementary school they are at risk of suffering from back problems accumulated over vital growth periods throughout the years.

The principals were amazing. They immediately showed interest in my ideas, made the necessary accommodations for my experiments, and hopped on board with me to raise awareness within the district and around the town. Most of them admitted they hadn’t heard anything about overweight backpacks within at least the last five years, from either parents or students. They all agreed, however, that the number of children suffering from back pain, scoliosis, and growth problems must be correlated to the increase in backpack weight over the years. The resulting backpack averages from my experiments are enough on their own to show just how extensive the issue already is, and how as time goes by the matter only becomes worse.

Currently there are no backpack regulations for the student body, but starting with this article I plan to raise awareness through the student handbook, the East Hampton School District’s online page, parent emails, and health classes. In the meantime, I contacted Matt Vogel, a locally acclaimed physical therapist, for his advice on how to help ease and prevent back pain:

1. Always wear two backpack straps to evenly distribute the weight. 2. Use a back brace, Velcro, adjustable straps, and/or clips to secure the bag. 3. Stretch as often as you can to keep your muscles warm and flexible. 4. Good posture!

I believe the more that students, parents, faculty, and administrators are conscious of this issue, the less likely it will be for overweight backpacks to cause serious health problems later on in students’ lives. School can really weigh a kid down as it is, and this is one burden they can do without.

A year ago Hannah Vogel wrote a “Guestwords” about her mission trip to Cuba through the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

I discovered the eminent economist William Vickrey, a 1996 Nobel laureate, in an odd way. Although I’ve written about Wall Street and money for many years, my academic background was not in economics, but in American literature. So when I was looking for a pungent epigraph for “Up From Gold,” my 2012 book on the development of our modern dollar-based economy, I thought of a quip by Gertrude Stein (the doyenne of American writers in 1920s Paris, famous for “a rose is a rose is a rose”). As I remembered it, she said, “Economics is simple. First there is money in someone’s pocket, and when you look again, the money is in someone else’s pocket. That’s economics.”

When I Googled the quote to test my memory, up popped William Vickrey’s 1992 presidential address to the American Economic Association, in which he offered a snappier version: “As Gertrude Stein remarked, ‘The money is always there, it’s the pockets that keep changing.’ ”

When he died in 1996 at the age of 82, Vickrey was promptly forgotten by most of the economics profession; a small following keeps his memory and his ideas alive. A maverick all his life — a Quaker and conscientious objector — he often disagreed vehemently with what he described in his 1992 address as “the great bulk [of economists] close to the seats of power.” His Gertrude Stein quote came as he was denouncing a “callous tolerance for unemployment” within both the government and the economics profession. He blasted the “monetary authorities” for their “remoteness from the grim realities of unemployment,” and he derided the theory of a “non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment,” or NAIRU, which assumes a trade-off between unemployment and inflation.

At the time, most economists believed that 5 to 6-percent unemployment was “necessary” to restrain inflation. Some of them even referred to a “natural rate of unemployment,” a phrase that Vickrey called “one of the most vicious euphemisms ever coined.” In words that still reverberate, he told his colleagues, “It is high time we gave human values a deserved priority instead of staying mesmerized by figures on balance sheets. . . . What is urgently needed is to bring the economy rapidly to a point of genuine full employment and keep it there.”

Most Americans instinctively agree with Vickrey and can’t understand why, seven years after the economy collapsed, despite Federal Reserve efforts (the “QE2” quantitative easing, etc.), and despite assurances from policy makers that their focus is on jobs and jobs, unemployment remains a drag on economic growth. Is there an explanation for this? There is, and Gertrude Stein’s imagery helps us find it.

The money that moves through the economy is, for all Americans, dollars, whether in paper or bank deposit form. This is true for all individuals, including economists, and for all corporations or other business entities. Buyers of, for example, Bitcoins measure their gains or losses in dollars. Owners of gold value their holdings in dollars. All players in the economy use their dollars to buy goods and services, and “the economy” is nothing more than the sum total of all the movements of dollars from one pocket to another in exchange for something else.

This process seems obvious today, but, as I related in “Up From Gold,” it took 500 years to create our modern banking system and complete the extraordinary conversion from a gold-based economy to a dollar-based economy. In fact, the conversion was not fully accomplished until the 1960s, yet understanding the implications of so fundamental a change is crucial to understanding our economy.

The difference between using dollars and using gold is that you can dig more gold from the earth, or ship it from overseas mines, but you can’t create dollars in the same way. The German Treasury in the 1920s literally printed marks and paid government employees with them, thereby destroying both the currency and the economy. The U.S. Treasury is prohibited by law from printing money or selling bonds directly to (that is, borrowing dollars directly from) the Federal Reserve. All paper dollars printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing are distributed to banks, at their request, to have on hand when existing depositors want to withdraw “cash.”

Nonetheless, there is clearly more wealth, and more dollars, in the nation today than there was 50 years ago. So how does the total number of dollars grow?

The answer is that dollars increase when an economic player, whether an individual, a business, or a corporation, borrows from a bank. This process is rarely explained in official publications, but think of it this way. You and all other economic players know how much money you have; you can envisage a pile of physical dollars that represents your total wealth today. If you borrow a dollar from my pile, yours is a dollar higher and mine a dollar lower, but the economy’s total number of dollars hasn’t changed. If you borrow a dollar from a bank, however, you have not diminished my pile or any other player’s, yet your pile is higher. The total number of dollars in the economy has increased.

It is also true that when you repay that dollar to a bank, the number of dollars in the economy shrinks. Again, this process becomes clear when we ask where you find the dollars to repay your loan. You can only get them by selling goods or services to other players in the economy, who transfer dollars from their pockets to yours. You then return those dollars to the bank that created them, the bank tears up the note you signed, and the created dollars disappear. The economy has grown, but the number of dollars has not.

Dollars do increase over time, but only through additional borrowing by a growing population, in a growing economy. The wealth of the nation, in the form of useable and productive assets, increases through the economic activities that borrowing makes possible, and with that increased wealth, and the larger economy, additional borrowing is possible. The absolute amount of borrowing can increase as long as the economy grows as well.

What I’ve described represents the whole economy, including the U.S. government (that is, the Treasury), which, like all players, borrows from other players, or taxes them, without increasing the total dollars in the economy. The difference lies in the relation of the Treasury to the Federal Reserve.

In the first place, the Fed is a bank — or more precisely a national system of banks. It is not, however, like the familiar banking corporations we all keep our money in. The Fed has just one main customer, the U.S. Treasury. The Fed receives taxes and borrowed money for the Treasury and maintains its accounts. All the checks the Treasury issues are written on its accounts at the Fed, just as your checks are written on your banking corporation.

I’ve said that the Treasury cannot borrow directly from the Federal Reserve, and when it borrows from you or me, the total amount of dollars in the economy does not change. However, the Fed can buy Treasury bonds from economic players who lent money to the Treasury and received the bonds. As a bank, the Fed creates the dollars it puts into the pockets of bond owners when it buys bonds from them. The dollars the Treasury previously received when it sold the bonds went into the pockets of players providing goods or services to the government, and those dollars continue to exist in those pockets. Now the Fed creates new dollars to put back into the pockets of the original bond buyers.

In other words, when the Federal Reserve buys Treasury bonds from players in the real economy, total dollars in the economy do increase. This is the full meaning of QE2 and other phrases. It is the action that commentators are in fact describing when they speak of the Fed “pumping money into the economy.”

The answer to our original question — why Fed actions have not restored the economy and significantly reduced unemployment — now becomes clear. The economic players from whom the Fed buys Treasury bonds haven’t spent the increased dollars on goods or services, because they bought the Treasury bonds in the first place as investments, and they count the bonds or the dollars in their assets. The vast majority of government bonds that are traded are exchanged among those investors — including pension funds, hedge funds, etc. — with dollars changing pockets among them constantly. When the Fed steps in and buys government bonds, it is simply acting as another trader among all the asset traders — and not the largest one. The Fed’s major announcement last year that it would buy up to $100 billion of Treasury bonds per month should be seen in the context of the whole market. Outstanding Treasury bonds now total over $17 trillion, of which some $300 billion to $400 billion trade daily.

In essence, through its purchases of Treasury bonds, the Fed creates more dollars to circulate among asset traders. To reduce unemployment, the government will have to put more dollars into the hands of those who will spend them on goods and services. Their additional buying will encourage more business borrowing and an expansion of the nation’s productive capacity.

Malcolm Mitchell is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine. He lives in New York and East Hampton.

In 1961 I was 8 years old and Sandy Koufax was the most dominant pitcher in baseball. He was also my favorite player. It wasn’t common in those days for girls to collect baseball cards, but I did. The only card I did not have was Sandy Koufax.

One day walking home from religious instruction at Our Lady of Lourdes in Massapequa Park, I felt something hit me in the head. I quickly looked around, thinking someone had thrown something at me, but there was no one around and I was in an open area. The only thing visible, lying at my foot, was a Sandy Koufax baseball card. I was duly flabbergasted at this stroke of luck, but of course immediately began to consider that since no one was around this must be divine intervention, having after all just come from religious instruction. Or it was just baseball magic.

Going into this last week of the regular season in baseball, I find myself hoping for more of that baseball magic. I find it hard to imagine that Derek Jeter, my favorite player these last 20 years, will play his last game in Fenway Park on Sunday, unless somehow not only do the Yankees miraculously play flawless baseball down the stretch, but all the teams in front of them in the wild card race collapse. As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over,” etc.

Whatever happens, baseball will not be the same next year — that is, New York baseball, and in particular Yankee baseball. And as rocky as this season has been, I’m glad Jeter announced his retirement early and shared it with baseball fans throughout the country. I grew up in an era when many baseball players were not very cordial to each other, to say the least, but Derek Jeter has brought a civility to the game that proves that the only things necessary are talent and sportsmanship.

In an era of performance-enhancing drugs, Jeter is the epitome of what a baseball player did not have to do to be great. In 20 years Derek Jeter never embarrassed himself or baseball. He understood that as the captain of the Yankees he was a leader and he had to set an example. He was respectful and therefore respected. He never kicked the dirt or argued with an ump. He played the game the way it was supposed to be played. He worked hard and he played hard. If he hit a ball deep he never stood and watched it. He ran out every hit. He fielded every ball as if he could make the play, and many times that meant going deep in the hole behind shortstop, fielding it bare-handed, and releasing it midair, accurately, to Tino or Teixeira at first base.

We remember those plays and hits: the 2001 “flip” play along the first-base line to Jorge Posada to tag out Jeremy Giambi at the plate, the dive into the stands along the left-field line in 2004 when he made the catch but came up bruised and bloody, the home run for his 3,000th hit, and the many playoff and World Series clutch hits and home runs. He wasn’t called Mr. November for nothing. Jeter has been thrilling to watch. We came to expect near perfection.

Watching as Jeter went from stadium to stadium this season has been a delight. This was not an easy season for the Yankees or Jeter, as both struggled, the Yankees with pitching and Jeter with hitting, although Jeter’s bat has gotten hot again, and he still managed to make some spectacular fielding plays throughout this final season. But to see fans in the stands all over the country wearing their home team’s hat and a Jeter T-shirt was great. To see opposing teams stand on the top step of their dugout while Jeter was paid tribute to. And to hear active and retired players pay tribute to him has been heartwarming. My favorite was young Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals, who said that Jeter was “not just the captain of the Yankees, but the captain of baseball.”

This is in no way to say that Derek Jeter is a hero or the greatest baseball player of all time. A hero is someone who cures cancer or saves someone’s life or sacrifices his or her own life. And I think Derek Jeter would be the first to agree with this statement. Jeter is someone who loves to play baseball and feels he owes it to the fans to play it the best he can.

So it would be selfish on my part to want more of that baseball magic after what he has given us for 20 years. What Derek Jeter deserves now is simply this: Thanks!

Diane Spina York, a retired social studies teacher, taught at East Hampton High School for 20 years. She lives in Springs.

“What a great country we have here when it decides to be.” — John Updike

“We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In September 1932, Franklin Roosevelt crossed the country to San Francisco to give a speech that contributed mightily to his landslide election to the presidency six weeks later. I yearn to hear the likes of it today from Hillary Clinton.

The United States, F.D.R. said, needed a new social contract. Throughout most of our history, anyone willing to work could earn a good living. If a depression came along, all you had to do was climb into a covered wagon and head west, where free land and jobs were plentiful.

But, F.D.R. continued, by the start of the 20th century the free land was gone and our corporate and financial leaders had become “malefactors of great wealth” and “princes of profit” — exerting “uncontrolled and irresponsible powers” akin to “the feudal barons of old.” We were becoming an “economic oligarchy.” Equality of opportunity no longer existed. The government had to expand its role in the economy to facilitate creation of jobs and otherwise ease the burden on the great numbers of people who were suffering.

Backed by Congress and prodded by his determined wife, Eleanor, F.D.R. moved swiftly. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which recruited millions of unemployed young men to work on public land development and conservation. The Works Progress Administration constructed public buildings and oversaw the Federal Art Project, which paid a monthly stipend to struggling writers and artists, among them East Hampton’s de Kooning, Krasner, and Pollock.

The Tennessee Valley Authority provided low-cost electricity to poor rural areas. The Agricultural Adjustment Act firmed farm prices that had so thoroughly collapsed, tens of thousands of farm families abandoned their land and, impoverished, set off to find work. The National Labor Relations Act, at present under attack in Congress, reduced obstacles to workers forming unions and in doing so paved the way for the amazing mid-20th-century growth of our middle class. The Social Security Act of 1935 thrives today as a source of economic stability for our elderly and disabled and for the country as a whole. And, until its repeal, led by Bill Clinton in 1999, the Glass-Steagall Banking Act stood as a bulwark against investment industry shenanigans that were to rock the country with the financial trauma of 2008.

Some of F.D.R.’s princes of profit called him a socialist and traitor to his class, the old wealth that then prevailed on Wall Street. “They are unanimous in their hate for me,” he said while campaigning for re-election in 1936, “and I welcome their hatred.” He carried 46 of the 48 states and all but 8 of the 531 electoral votes.

I believe that in order to be elected president in 2016, Mrs. Clinton must commit to a new, similarly focused social contract that signals her independence from the magnetism and influence of great wealth. The country needs this, as it did in the 1930s, to recover from its economic and spiritual funk. And she needs it, personally, as a mission for a prospective presidency and to reinforce the Clintons’ legacy.

The similarities between now and 1932 are startling — the decline of equal opportunity and the morale of working families, the narcissistically applied power of the very rich, the deification of money and those who make mountains of it by fair or foul, while our leaders seem unable to provide a safe financial system and enough jobs offering opportunity and livable income. Now as then, this demands a strong, compassionate leader directing strong, compassionate policies who can stare down the 21st century’s malefactors of great wealth.

Such a social contract could also mend cracks that have appeared in the Clintons’ credibility, notably from perceptions of excessive closeness with the “.1 percent” and a preoccupation with attaining personal wealth. The routing of speaking fees — upward of $200,000 per speech for Hillary (and $700,000 for Bill) — to the Clinton Foundation rather than the Clintons personally, though apparently legal, diminishes trust in her statesmanship and provides a potent weapon for her opponents, which can best be countered by a potent program of her own.

F.D.R.’s site choice to unveil his social contract was inspired — San Francisco, a youthful city, symbol of optimism and vigor, traits the country needed to survive and that F.D.R. feared the Depression was crushing. Mrs. Clinton needs a similarly telling site to introduce her 21st-century social contract. That site is East Hampton, nexus of Clinton campaign money-raising and symbol of the country’s gaping economic apar­theid.

To highlight her focus, the presentation should be delivered north of the highway, a part of our town James Brady, author of “Further Lane,” called “the other Hamptons.” East Hampton High School would be a good place. So might Studio 3 at LTV, our local television station. The audience should be predominantly north of the highway — our parks and highways workers, farmers, traditional and organic, fishermen, nurses, waiters, engineers, chefs, the seniors and working families in our town’s affordable-housing homes and apartments.

Mrs. Clinton needs to show that to restore fairness, a healthy economy, and balanced budget she will risk, as F.D.R. did, being labeled a socialist and traitor, that she is not knitted to a coterie of superrich financiers. Rather, she is a potential leader of our democracy who, if we elect her, will make certain that the people who profit hugely from our financial casino are no longer pampered by our tax and regulatory codes and a presidency that frets at the prospect of their displeasure.

Richard Rosenthal is author of “The Dandelion War,” a satire on class warfare in the Hamptons.