The Need for Change: Complicity

Last week I wrote about one of the needs for change on Lindsay’s City Council:  the “plain ignorance” of current members about the economic facts of life for most of our residents, as well as ignorance of the City’s actual financial condition during Scot Townsend’s administration.
If it was just ignorance, however, one would expect a stronger reaction when the facts were discovered than we received from this Council.  In fact, one would even want to see them take some action to recover lost money and restore funds to their proper uses. That didn’t happen.
I was reminded of this by a question asked at Thursday night’s candidates forum held by the Dolores Huerta Foundation.  “Many believe City employees misused funds.  Would you take steps to investigate this further?” the candidates were asked.  The incumbents essentially said “No,” taking the position they’ve held since the 2009-2010 audit confirmed massively bad bookkeeping, unlawful use of funds and wasteful spending that citizens had raised questions about for months: “Nobody did anything wrong.”
After reviewing the HomePages from the past two years and seeing this same kind of response to one issue after another, I am willing to lay the charge of complicity against this Council. The dictionary’s primary definition of “complicity” is “the fact or state of being an accomplice; partnership in wrongdoing.” The current members of this Council are complicitous with the staff and are either blinded or made mute by their interests in seeing the staff’s programs continue no matter the costs to the community.
Those costs are both economic and social. The staff’s response to the City’s possible bankruptcy headlining last week’s edition was a perfect case in point. “(T)he City of Lindsay would still NOT entertain the idea of declaring bankruptcy because there are no lenders that can take anything from us,” said the finance director. Bankruptcy is the legal form creditors use to defend their assets from lenders while restructuring their finances. TCAG can’t repossess the Downtown Improvement Project; the USDA can’t take back Tulare Road, the Aquatic or Wellness Center - and who would want an economic albatross like McDermont?
But bankruptcy wasn’t the issue raised by the 2009-2010 audit, or even the 2010-2011 one. “Solvency” is. To be solvent is “to be able to pay all one’s debts or meet all financial responsibilities.” The city finance director says we have and we will, but that is totally dependent on how forgiving the lenders and grantmakers will be about the requirements attached to the various monies the City received and spent like wastrels.
According to the new audit, Lindsay continues to be a going concern, noting this Council’s complete agreement with Townsend’s “overambitious City transformation schedule,” which the staff still plan to accomplish.  “(T)he bottom line,” concluded the finance director in last week’s article “is that the vision has been accomplished - Lindsay has been improved... and Lindsay residents do have access to better facilities, i.e., the City Library, McDermont Field House, Sweet Briar Plaza Park, the Aquatic Center, the Wellness Center, and very soon the renovated City Park, than any other community in this Valley.”
If only they had transformed the city into something we, who have trouble keeping the lights and water on, could pay for, I might feel a little more gratitude. But all I see is that the upper 25% of this community (which includes the current city council members) now have better places to play while the rest of us work overtime.
- Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes. You can send her your economic disparity observations - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA  93247.

The Need for Change: Plain Ignorance

In less than five weeks Lindsay’s citizens will have the chance to vote for city council members for the first time in 6 years.  Three incumbents are being challenged by four community members hoping to change the direction of this city’s future. But what is the need for change?
The greatest need is for people who will represent and be responsive to the needs of the all of the residents of our community, town and country alike. Three of the challengers -  Tim Daubert, Rosaena Sanchez, and Steven Mecum - have been central in raising awareness of just how unrepresentative the current council members are. For the past two years all three have spent untold hours and energy investigating the City’s entanglements and looking for ways to open this government to its people.
Let’s go back two years to the old high school gym where, on Oct. 19, 2010, nearly 800 people gathered for a special city council meeting, hoping to speak their minds about the high-rise City salaries in a low-rent town. It was a tightly structured meeting, where the City’s supporters (who made up maybe 15% of the crowd) were given equal time to speak, seeming to outweigh the other 85%, whose basic question was “How can you justify paying these people this much in a town where half of us can’t pay our water bills?”
They received no answer. Mayor Murray picked up on the water bill half of the question, and flatly stated that they have to charge that much because that’s what it costs and the city charter says they have to. A year later, after the 2009-2010 audit was completed, they would discover that a hell of a lot of extra salaries were being paid out of the water fund in a bookkeeping nightmare so snarled it took nine months for the auditors to figure it out. Nobody apologized for the error, or for the fact that their ignorance of what was going on has put this city $36 million in debt. Two years later we are paying $70,000 (paid for by grants, of course,) for two studies of our water system to tell us if it’s in the black and if it can handle the growth Townsend was trying to generate with his development dreams.
That night in the gym, Sr. Seraphim Rivera said it best in perfectly clear Spanish. Speaking directly to the Council members, he said “I don’t think you know what it’s like to lie awake in the night not knowing how you’re going to pay your water bill.” He wasn’t complaining about the water bill so much as he was pointing to the council members’ ignorance of the life circumstances and living conditions of a great many of us. The few well-paying jobs they initially created at McDermont (and funded lavishly with City money) they gave to Murray’s kids and Townsend’s sister and her son, as well as to others from out of state. When challenged with conflict of interest claims, all we concerned citizens received was blank stares. They could not comprehend what it felt like to be on the wrong side of the privilege line.
This kind of ignorance is all too common, but Nov. 6th we get to decide how much we want to suffer from it. Please remember that your vote counts for something for the first time in a long while, and support the candidates who know who we really are.
-Trudy Wischemann is a working-class open government advocate who writes. You can send her your bill-paying nightmare stories - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA  93247.

Fear Talking

“That’s just fear talking,” I’ve reminded myself too many times lately. Fear shapes my mental conversations easily: I come from fearful parents, one afraid of authority, the other afraid of shame. The combination is both helpful and deadly, depending on degree. For me, keeping them in balance with courage and wisdom has been a lifelong effort.
I almost let fear keep me from attending my sister’s wedding this weekend. I focused on the obvious problems, physical and financial: how to get there, how to pay for it, both seeming impossible.  But underneath was a swift current I couldn’t see but knew was there: how could I possibly be myself with these family members clumped along two opposing branches? Would I revert to my old fearful self, forced to chose one branch or the other or forever dangle between?
With massive support from friends, the physical and financial problems were set aside. My fear of shame got me on the road, then family love pulled me there. The event itself was an emotional morass, but a good one, maybe even healing.
And that’s how it’s been these past few months, dealing with one fear after another. Every time I tackled one (and sometimes that meant sneaking up on it,) I experienced the truth that fear itself is so much worse than the thing we’re afraid of.
Many of us are living with a great deal of fear right now, mostly fear of consequences of our country’s economic decline. If you’ve lost your job, you’re fearful of losing your home. If you’ve lost your home, you’re fearful of losing everything, including yourself. If you haven’t lost your job, maybe you’re fearful of losing it. The possibilities are endless.
To some extent, those fears are the undercurrent of heightening fear surrounding the upcoming election. Whether we look at the Presidency, our federal and state governing bodies, propositions and bond issues, even our local city councils and district boards, a sense of fear is growing about the outcomes of November. You can taste it in your mouth, feel it in the air.
I think it matters very much who is in the White House, although I don’t think one man by himself can take back the power we’ve given to corporations. That will take millions of us, and we’d better get started. Likewise, I think it matters very much who sits on our city councils and school boards, but until the residents relearn the ropes of local participation, our communities will still be in too few hands.
Feel worried and stressed over the upcoming elections? That’s just fear talking. Make it hush, learn about the issues, and we’ll all have less to worry about come November. Fellow Lindsayites, come to the candidates’ forum at the Wellness Center Thursday, Oct. 11th at 6 p.m.
-Trudy Wischemann is an election-phobic writer on community issues.  You can challenge her with your ballot-box ideas - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA  93247.

A Foreign Language

At the end of this summer, as an antidote to the books I read on children and war, I read Living in a Foreign Language:  A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy (2007).  It was written by Michael Tucker, an actor who starred on “LA Law” with his wife Jill Eikenberry, who together bought a small, rustic villa in the mountains of Italy. Their love for the place grew as they became intimate with the local food and the people who make it.  Finally deciding to become fully resident, they began to learn the language and speak it with their neighbors.
It’s a wonderful story about finding and making Home by two people who know real love.  “To have the partner of a lifetime - for a lifetime - is rare stuff....What extraordinary freedom it is not to care about up or down, rich or poor, East Coast, West Coast, as long as we’re in the taxi together,” Tucker concludes at his happy ending.
But a sentence in his story about attending Italian Language School found its mark in me.  “I must admit our language skills improved remarkably - even though my head felt like the inside of a golf ball, with all those tight little rubber bands wound around each other under four thousand pounds of pressure,” he noted humorously.  Unfortunately, that is often what my head feels like working at RN Market.
You might think “Yes, being immersed in all that Spanish,” but what you might not notice on your brief shopping trips there is that a great deal of Chinese is also spoken, with just as much enthusiasm but even less vowel and consonant recognizability.
I am happy for both language groups that they have a place to speak and hear their native tongues, but the inside of a golf ball is what my head often feels like. I had thought that re-opening my slim bag of Spanish words and phrases would help, and generally it has.  Unfortunately, it has also raised the expectations of Spanish speakers that I comprehend what they say in response, and those are the moments when I feel like an airborne golf ball on its way to the first hole.  Also unfortunately, when I find myself needing to communicate with some Asian speaker, sometimes Spanish comes out of my mouth, confounding us both.
Sometimes I look at these non-English-speakers and wonder what the insides of their heads feel like.  What it feels like to be standing there handing over hundred dollar bills they’ve earned picking grapes and olives for food they used to grow and harvest or butcher themselves.  What it feels like to have their little ones learn the word “quarter” before they learn sentences, wanting coins for the vending machines by the door.  To have their teenagers blindly texting, oblivious to the packages that need carrying to the car.
Many of us English speakers feel like we’re living involuntarily in a foreign language, and resent the people who’ve brought it here.  But it seems to me that we are all surrounded by foreign tongues and foreign ways.  This land will feel like a foreign country until we get inside each others’ heads and start to unwind those little rubber bands.
- Trudy Wischemann is an English-speaking writer who never learned her grandmothers’ mother tongues. Write to her - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.

On Warfare

“Lindsay will probably be very quiet tonight,” the mother said to her son Friday afternoon as they stood at my checkstand.  I’d heard scraps of their muted conversation as I scanned their groceries, catching few words between the register’s beeps and clanging carts.  But I’d heard enough to ask why.
 “They killed a young boy today, over on Sycamore,” she said, starting to tell the facts she’d just heard from her son.  At that moment, the facts were still being gathered by the police; the “breaking news” was hours away.  But from her story it sounded like gang warfare.
This summer I spent some time reading about warfare, particularly the effects on children.  I wanted to see if there was a difference between fighting and war, where (and why) things escalate from one to the other.  Friday’s news sent me back to Roger Rosenblatt’s Children of War (1983) in which he explored children’s lives in the war zones of Belfast, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, Cambodia and Viet Nam.
In general, he found the younger children loving and gentle, many waiting for peace and hoping to work for it when they grew up.  But as they got older, especially in places like Palestine where some became teenage soldiers, they’d become politicized, fighting for “the cause.”  The causes were (and still are) large and real: who has a right to live where. To call some place home. To eat. To exist.
When I found this paragraph, however, I saw shades of the reasons given for teens joining gangs.  Rosenblatt writes:  “I noticed in myself a general tendency to treat these children (soldiers) with respect....because I saw they had committed themselves to the most dangerous game in the world and were visibly dignified by that commitment.
“So is it valuable, then,” he asks, “this heightening, ennobling tradition that teaches the children of Rashidieh to leap over bonfires with guns in their arms, makes them more alert to each other’s welfare, gives them pride and a sense of importance?”
 “No,” he answers.  “For one thing, a state of war takes away the freedom of thought and opinion.  It provides an ideology, all right, but only one, and individual disagreement is called treason or sedition.” He adds thoughts about moral complexity and shades of gray, then concludes “War may be hell, but intellectually and spiritually war is also easy.  That may be why it is resorted to so readily, why in fact children can do it so well.
 “(T)he overriding reason that war can never be deemed useful, whatever benefits are evident or concocted, is that...the context of war is death.  For all its elaborate emphases on order and discipline, the final purpose of war is to create chaos and ruin.”
I don’t know who the Grand Marshals of our children’s armies are or what they hope to win from this violence.  But I  do know that almost all of us need to learn the harder way to live together.  Maybe we should start.
-Trudy Wischemann is a sometimes scrappy, sometimes remorseful writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your peace stories - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.

The Art of Irrigating

For the last couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of moving water for a small farmer who was called away to a fire.  He balances his good and bad years in farming with the income he makes from CDF fighting range and forest fires, and so far that strategy has worked.  I balance my low income from part-time work in the food retail business with what he shares with me from the fires, as well as my other sources of self-employment.  So far I’m still here, too.ss
But mostly I do it for the joy.  For those of you who don’t farm, “moving water” is simply turning valves on and off  so that one batch of trees (called “blocks”) is irrigated every day, followed by the next batch.  After the water is running on the new blocks, I check the sprinklers to make sure they’re all working and no geysers have developed in the lines, then go home and take off my muddy boots.  Sounds simple, possibly even boring.
The joy is in the details.  Part of the joy is physical:  sun and wind on body, feet moving surely through the rows, hands employed.  Part of it is aesthetic: the sounds of water running, crows calling, doves suddenly fleeing in a whirr; the sights of cloud shadows moving over the landscape, the smell of wet earth.
Part of it is intellectual.  Irrigating puts me right into the heart of growing food and what it means to be someone who does it for a living.  Every micro-decision - whether to replace that old sprinkler head (“fan jet” in this case) with a new one or let it limp along, to patch or splice the hose or let it leak - enters me in the contest between man and land, the challenge of getting land to produce something for the market in such a way that it will keep producing in the future.  Our great society is dependent on winning that contest, though few seem to realize it.
For some, irrigating is a science.  Calculations of how much water a tree needs and how to deliver that water more economically given evapotranspiration rates and climatic conditions, soil qualities and slope, water pH, etc., are studied and discussed not only in the ag departments and journals of our universities, but also in the coffee shops and irrigation parts stores.  Fan jets come with different sized orifices that emit different amounts of water; farmers chose what size based on calculations of water pressure, age of trees, amounts of shade (dependent on their pruning and weed control strategies,) and other factors too numerous to mention.  That choice is a small part of developing an irrigation strategy that will work on their land with their crops.
Not involved in those choices, I simply practice irrigating as an art.  Part dance, part song, I move through the trees quietly so as not to disturb the wildlife any more than necessary.  I make sure each tree is getting a drink while observing the weeds’ growth patterns and examining what comes out of the plugged-up fan jets when I insert my trusty safety pin through the hole.  I marvel at the diversity of plant and animal life in each block of orange trees, what certainly would be considered monoculture.  And when I’m finished, I hear the trees quietly clapping for my performance, breathing sighs of appreciation as they move into theirs:  uptake H2O; transpire, converting CO2 to O2, turning carbon into oranges swelling with each irrigation.
Part song, part dance, the earth’s role far overshadows ours.  My biggest reward is remembering that and sensing myself as its tiny handmaiden.
-Trudy Wischemann is a writer with dirt under her fingernails.  You can share your irrigating stories with her - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.