CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

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.

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........

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