Codger’s Column: Safety first
Crone said it first: “I don’t feel safe any more.”
That puzzled Codger at the time. After all, wasn’t this still America with its checks and balances, due process, free speech. Even more comforting, they were living on Shelter Island, protected by a moat. They’d both grown up with the post-World War II belief that Fascism could never happen here.
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 don’t deserve to go down like this.
Codger wonders what took him so long to tell Crone, “I don’t feel safe any more, either.”
Was it from watching a terrible tide come in? The first big wave was the pardoning of the Trump mob who tried to overturn democracy by storming the Capitol. Then there was the shooting of shipwrecked sailors, the killing of American citizens bearing witness to the takeover of an American city, making war without congressional permission or a comprehensive plan, and, close to home, plucking Greenport residents off the ferry line and detaining them?
Somewhere in all that was a local act both existential and symbolic. Talk about feeling unsafe. How could the billionaire Soloviev Group shut down the Town’s only pharmacy on such short notice? Did they get moral permission from a national administration that shows little regard for the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of its citizens?
Or did this national administration get its moral permission from the oligarchs who put it in power and the ordinary citizens who weren’t paying attention?
The Solovievs loom large in Codger’s anxiety because of their continuing impact on the Island’s psyche, but they are hardly the only specters. The fragility of its tenuous safety net was underscored last week during a Reporter Forum on local health care, or its lack thereof.
The big question for Codger that evening was why is there such inadequate medical presence on the Island? That turned out to be easy to answer. It’s too hard to bring in doctors and nurses without housing and high salaries. Even for a major medical organization like Northwell or Stony Brook, there seems to be no real profit in it.
The answer to a bigger question was, What can we do about it? Government subsidies on a federal or municipal level seem beyond reach, even though a few days’ worth of ballistic missiles would easily staff the medical center. Of course, that’s about political priorities and will. Codger hasn’t worked out his own foreign policy, but right now he tends to think blowing up an Iranian school isn’t as important as fixing education, infrastructure and health care right here.
Meanwhile, there’s something else going on. Even if there was a doctor on duty every day on the Island, there are people who would be afraid to leave the house for treatment. They don’t think their documents would sustain a screening by the ICE agents presumably skulking on the Greenport side of the ferry. When Codger wonders what it must feel like to cower in your house, afraid of a knock on your door, much less being arrested on the way to work or school or the IGA, he thinks of Anne Frank in an Amsterdam attic. Her Diary has frequently been banned, ostensibly for her teen-aged musings on sex, more likely, Codger thinks, for its depiction of Fascism.
Codger doesn’t think we are there yet, and there are things to do. As mentioned in a past column, Islanders have joined the Organizacion de Latino Americana (OLA) whose “Operation to Stand & Protect” witnesses and documents ICE activity. Of all their activities, Codger found most poignant the setting up of guardianship arrangements so that children separated from their parents by ICE can be taken in by family and friends rather than left to the casual cruelty of the government.
Codger came slow to his current anxiety because a straight white male raised in the booming 1950’s felt pretty secure. Show up sober and you’ll get a job. Keep your nose clean and your mouth shut and you’ll move up the ladder. Early in his career, a naïve pre-Codger suspected paranoia in the stories he heard from Black, Brown, women and closeted gay friends about the workplace networks of the big white boys, especially during the 10 years he worked in television. They sustained their control with what Codger would much later identify as bush-league Epstein fraternities.
The civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights movements were joyous — and, alas, temporary — reckonings. Who thought the Evil Empire would strike back so successfully?
The price of inattention is the continued erosion of safety for everybody who doesn’t qualify for the VIP sections of the Epstein files.
