DAN'S PAPERS, May 7, 2010 Page 13 www.danshamptons.com
Rent-a-Protester Send 3 Porgies to the Fulton Fish Market. Save the Baymen. By Dan Rattiner There was a time years ago when people would protest at the drop of a hat. I remember those days. We opposed building a nuclear plant at Shoreham, Long Island. We got out our signs, hopped in a school bus and, by the hundreds, marched back and forth in front of the construction workers, even going so far as to scale the chain link fence. Ultimately, we were dragged down, arrested and taken to the Shoreham Police Station in yellow school busses to be fingerprinted and slapped with summonses. Eventually we’d be released, and the charges dropped. We’d demonstrate against the War in Vietnam, we’d demonstrate against people roping off the beaches. One year, when I found out that nothing was being done to save the Montauk Lighthouse from erosion, we organized a demonstration at the Lighthouse. Two thousand people came. The propensity to demonstrate or march back then was so great that one Presidential administration actually felt that we were destabilizing the country and near to bringing in a reign of chaos. We were as amazed at that idea as they were. Today practically nobody is ready to get up off their butt and go out and demonstrate for or against anything. Even the announced closing of our local college, which might have brought thousands of people out into the street in protest in years gone by, and resulted in the takeover of an administration building or two, just brought out a few hundred peaceable people. I don’t know what it is. We live in different times. Maybe it’s Twitter or video games. Maybe it’s our Homepages or Facebooks. We can
express ourselves freely now where before we could not. As for making a difference, we really, frankly, just don’t feel like it. We’ve got a global economy. There are so many voices. And the only people who really do seem to make a difference are the superheroes we see on our TV screens. They fall from the roofs of 20 story buildings, splat on the sidewalk and then get up and run off to fight another day. And even they have to get through a whole season of episodes or an entire two hour movie to even make a
community. They worked the seas, dropping lobster pots, clamming in the tidal waters, haul seining fish catches with big nets they threw into the surf, and otherwise making a living and raising their families with the bounty they got from the seas. There were thousands of them. They lived in scattered communities throughout the area, in East Quogue, Flanders, Hampton Bays, North Sea, Springs and Amagansett. Many of them referred to themselves as Bonackers. They lived in clans and spoke English with a sharp, very identifiable accent. There were, during those days, as many as 1,500 Bonackers—people whose forebears went back to the Colonial Times and who came to America as the workers for the rich upper class Englishmen who became the leaders of this community back then. The Bonackers and the other baymen and other commercial fishermen are now reduced to just a few hundred men and women. The reason is the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. This group of laws severely limited the number of fish and shellfish that could be caught by commercial fishermen here. Government boats would go out and make catches of fish and note which fish were getting fished out. The catching of these fish was then severely limited or prohibited. The fishermen could no longer make a living. At one point, the government made it illegal to catch fish by haul seining along our beaches. This activity involved a big pickup truck with a giant rolled-up net that could be played out the back, a huge rowboat that could take the other end of the net out through the surf, and a bunch
If you want to make a ruckus, get arrested, get put in jail and let go, well, this is your chance. dent. Honestly, we’d just rather sit here and search the web. And so it is that this past week, there is a group of unhappy people that is seeking volunteers to go out and demonstrate against something. They can’t do it all themselves, and there is a reason for it as you will soon see. But if you want to make a ruckus, get arrested, get fingerprinted and put in jail for a bit, pay a fine, then get let go and eventually have the charges dropped and the monies returned, well, this is your chance. The group is the East Hampton Baymen’s Association and boy have they been going through a bad time. When I got here in the 1950s, the baymen and commercial fishermen were a big force in this
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