The ICE Barbarians Are at the Gates |
In early February, the barbarians reached my gate. There could be no more comfort or denial here on this island where I live. The masked thugs were roving through a town just across the water, a short ferry ride away, harassing and arresting long-time residents.
I was shocked, but not surprised. What do we do now? Yes, we all knew they were coming, still….
I was raised in the post-World War II “it can’t happen here” era. Hadn’t my parents’ generation crushed the Nazis for all time? While we’d been taught that democracy, like a faith or a marriage, did need tending, we had mostly taken it for granted. Yes, I did understand that life as I had lived it was under attack, but there was still, I thought, some time to respond.
The Republicans would come to their senses, right? They weren’t the Germans of a past era. The monster would sooner or later be brought down. And yes, he was bad, but he certainly wasn’t Hitler. And he looked so sickly. Eventually, the court system would kick in or the Epstein files would produce the Big Bang, whatever that might be. This was America, for God’s sake. We didn’t deserve to go down like this.
I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability.
Like most of my friends, I’d been thinking of little else for much too long and talking about it incessantly in a tone of wonder. Can you believe this shit? Yet living here on my island allowed me the destructive luxury of refusing to understand that we were all Minneapolitans, no matter where we were, even if our portfolios kept rising. Sure, we felt anxious and depressed, were wary of Trumpish neighbors, more generous donors to liberal causes, and active consumers of the media, but we were able to deflect the dangers, given our blind belief that being right was the best defense.
And I had an extra advantage: I was protected by a moat.
Shelter Island is a 28-square-mile town near the eastern end of New York’s Long Island in a region called the East End. It’s surrounded by water, but accessible by ferries from Greenport to the north and North Haven to the south. A third of the island is a protected nature conservancy. There are no street lights. The population in winter is around 3,000, which triples in the summer with tourists and second-home owners.
I’ve owned a home here for more than 30 years and lived here full-time for almost a decade, just about the right amount of time to appreciate the local mythology without entirely absorbing it—that Shelter Island is a quasi-independent republic, populated by rugged individualists who take care of their neighbors, especially seniors, through volunteer organizations (including a fire department and ambulance corps), while stoutly eschewing the glamorous greed of the nearby Hamptons.
It’s not been hard to feel above this country’s recent rush toward autocracy. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the island has been revising its sensibility in some progressive ways. For example, when I first arrived here in the 1980s, Shelter Island’s early history as a place of enslavement and provisioning for the slave trade was not a topic of polite conversation. Now, Sylvester Manor, once one of the earliest and northernmost slave plantations in this country, is internationally known for research and the preservation of slave remains and artifacts. It is also an integral local pillar through its educational farm.
It wasn’t until last year that I even realized just how vulnerable this island was to the whims of wealth and power. Yes, rich people routinely built houses and renovated hotels on the island that violated local zoning rules and they got away with it. But it wasn’t until one of our very own oligarchs casually betrayed our trust that I realized just how naïve we had been.
The Soloviev Group, one of the nation’s largest property owners, particularly of agricultural land, had bought a number of buildings on the island, including an iconic hotel, several stores, and the only pharmacy. Town officials mostly applauded the newcomers as “saviors.” Thanks to them, there would be an injection of money and jobs that would cover up the failures of those officials to come up with a comprehensive plan for taking care of Shelter Island, installing affordable housing, and protecting the water supply. They wouldn’t have to raise taxes, already low by regional standards.
“Shelter Island is like a womb,” said Stacey Soloviev, the ex-wife of Soloviev Group CEO Stefan Soloviev and the company’s cheery local face. “You feel very good when you come to Shelter Island.”
And for a while, the Solovievs did indeed go about their business on the island quietly feeling good without doing much good. Their parent corporation was busier. It tried and failed to build a gambling casino in midtown Manhattan. It negotiated with a nearby town to create a large residential development that would include a luxury spa. And then, out of the blue, in a stunning move with little notice, it suddenly shuttered the local hotel and closed the pharmacy, the only dispenser of medicine for a population that (like me) skewed elderly.
Like most Shelter Islanders, I was furious. As a board member of the town’s Senior Citizens Foundation, a support group for municipal senior services, I understood what an existential problem this could pose for people with limited mobility and resources, which just happens to be a large part of the population.
I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability. Our compassion, our tendency toward basic decency, our belief in fairness and equality were an enormous disadvantage in the battle against Trumpism, as was the faint shame so many of us felt for what seemed like a righteous posture, a sense of simply being better than those MAGA voters, handicapped as they were by manufactured fear and distinct inferiority complexes.
As for those super rich and intricately........