The pandemic makes people grip tighter onto the things we’d already feared—rightly or not—that we might be losing. Ordinary people call friends and families more now. The rich and powerful have secured trillions in bailouts in a top-down economy that’s been in ‘crisis’ for most of my life. The Democratic establishment put people in danger of contracting a deadly illness at the polls in order to avoid a progressive upset. I assumed that rich northeasterners would likewise tighten their stranglehold on the Cape’s playground economy, and wondered whether, this time, my friends and family would see the complete disregard for our lives in the summer folks’ visit this time. But Cape Cod’s class war continues to come rolled up in a flaky crust and served on a wooden skewer with a cellophane crumple on top at an open house. My friends, family, and former neighbors are doing what they’ve always done: extending mutual aid as far as a political analysis that would never willingly put those two words together will take them.

A profile of my great uncle Donald Wormwood.