Four Words

Published in edited form June 19, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     They came to me when I most needed them:  "Fight.  Dream.  Hope.  Love."  In that order.  Fight.  Dream.  Hope.  Love.

     I found them inside the CD of the soundtrack from Les Miserables that I'd ordered from the library, spread evenly across the top of the insert's back cover.  Below them on the left is a photo of Jean Valjean holding in his arms a girl of about ten. 

She is Cosette, whose serious eyes, dirty face and straggly hair also grace the front cover, staring out through the label-encrusted clear plastic jewel case as if behind bars, silently telling you that you know she deserves better.

 

 

Jean Valjean is the main character of this now beloved musical/opera, but Cosette is the teacher who moves Jean through the four words from fight to love.

 

    That "fight" led the list struck me hard, though at first glance it shouldn't have.  Les Mis is, after all, about the terrible poverty, injustices and corruption that led to the 1832 June Uprising in Paris in post-revolutionary France, where fighting led to more fighting and bloodshed than we like to remember.  It's like the parts of the Old Testament we like to forget, too.  I personally like to separate fighting from dreaming, hoping and loving, as if they don't belong together or are found on different sides of the brain.  But there they were, all in a chain that began with fighting that leads to dreaming and hoping, and perhaps produces or at least is healed by loving.  Linked.

 

    I fight.  I have the gene for it.  I also have the genes for dreaming, hoping and loving (I hope, although my loving is put to the test daily.)  I get tired of fighting, as does everyone who has the other genes.  If we didn't, there could be no peace.  But that fighting sometimes might be necessary for dreaming, hoping and loving was something to reconsider, and I've been working it over in my mind.

 

     Most people are reluctant to fight, at least in public, so some do an awfully lot of it at home behind closed doors.  I think the reason most people don't want to come to Lindsay City Council meetings is that they don't want to fight and are sure if they really spoke their minds, they'd find themselves doing exactly that.  "They don't care what I think," is what I hear every time I invite someone to join me there who has mentioned a problem or brought me a complaint as if I could speak their mind for them.  I appreciate knowing I'm not the only one unhappy with how things have happened here, but more people speaking their own minds would give my words more weight.  You know the saying:  many hands make work light.

 

     As I listened to the CD, the heroic music and the terrible sounds of human clashings, I recognized the civility of our situation.  What's required in Lindsay is simply work, not a fight.  Work is what's required in California regarding land and water.  But I fear for us sometimes that if we don't do the work, at some point in the future there may be nothing left but that undesirable alternative.

 

     Paul Taylor, whom I wrote about last week and many times before, had a wonderful quote he loved to use from Teddy Roosevelt advocating for the excess land law, that portion of the 1902 Reclamation Act which limited landholdings to 160 acres for receivers of irrigation water from federal dam projects.  In an address before the Commonwealth Club in 1912, Teddy, once a fighter himself, said:

 

     "I wish to save the very wealthy men of this country and their advocates and upholders from the ruin they would bring upon themselves if they were permitted to have their way.  It is because I am against revolution; it is because I am against the doctrines of the Extremists, of the Socialists; it is because I wish to see this country of ours continued as a genuine democracy; it is because I distrust violence and disbelieve in it; it is because I wish to secure this country against ever seeing a time when the 'have-nots' shall rise against the 'haves;' it is because I wish to secure for our children the same freedom of opportunity, the same peace and order and justice that we have had in the past."

 

     There's the diagnosis:  Inequal distribution of the country's resources leads to poverty, injustice and corruption.  The prescription?  Four words:  Work.  Dream.  Hope.  Love.

 

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Trudy Wischemann is a dreamer who sometimes has a hard time getting down to work.  She lives in Tulare County, California, where the idea of saying "no" to the Big Boys still makes most people go blank.

Me 'n Paul

Published in edited form June 12, 2013 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette

     "Well it's been rough and rocky travelin'

but I'm finally standing' upright on the ground

And after takin' several readings

I'm surprised to find my mind's still fairly sound

 

I guess Nashville was the roughest

but I know I've said the same about them all

We received our education

in the cities of the nation, me and Paul."

-- Willie Nelson

 

     "I'd have lost my mind if I did what you did, moving to a small town like Lindsay," said my treasured friend Bill Preston in a phone call last week.  Bill is the author of Vanishing Landscapes (1979), still the book on Tulare County's history that best describes the processes that shaped it.

 

     "I'm not sure that hasn't happened," I replied, making him laugh the laugh of truth.  We both know how I've struggled against despair, against lack of income, against lack of response to the message I brought with me when I leapt off the cliff of Davis to move to what was once a nice town and the home of a great olive.

 

     Sunday at the market a customer who thinks she has no ingles, a former neighbor who was glad I inquired about her casa nueva, struggled heroically to tell me about seeing me with Willie Nelson.  She loves his music, has one of his albums even though it's not in Spanish, and so when she saw my picture with Willie on the wall of the mini-storage office where my singing partner Jesse and I keep a poster from our last concert taped up just so people will know we do more than collect rent on metal rooms, she was thrilled.  I didn't realize what she thought until after she'd left, but Jesse was glad to know he'd been mistaken for that other musician.  And so it was no surprise I woke up the next morning with "Me and Paul" going through my head.

 

     Some of you who follow this column may have wondered about the last two weeks, where it seems I've shifted subjects from the City of Lindsay to the bad Big Boys of agriculture.  I've been examining the fear some people have about addressing the terrible power that comes when landownership and water rights are concentrated in their hands because I'm writing proposals to create the Center for Agricultural Communities where that very relationship will be studied and the results promulgated along with other issues facing our small towns in this valley.

 

     If I had not run into that fear before, I'd be blindly making propositions to people who don't know they have that fear until push comes to shove and then finding myself dangling from a limb like those old posters of a kitten whose front claws are all that's saving itself, with the words "Hang In There" heroically plastered below.  Been there, done that.

 

     What makes that fear hard for me to understand is that I came of age, so to speak, on the other side of that line:  in 380 Barrows Hall on the Berkeley campus, the office of Paul Schuster Taylor, professor emeritus of economics, whose work on farm labor led him to his work on reclamation law and the 160-acre limitation, intended to develop and protect small farms with irrigation projects in the arid west, where water is key to land.

 

     Sitting in that office, Paul had no fear of the Big Boys and wrote law journal articles and letters to politicians and journalists advocating the law's enforcement.  I know, because I helped type them.  But it wasn't just that he was insulated from pressure by his tenured status in the ivory tower:  he truly was not a fearful person.  In the recent Cornell dissertation on activist academics by Dan O'Connell, Paul's success in World War I leading his troops through minefields that few squadrons survived is detailed to show the mettle of the man.  After being gassed in France, he returned, recovered, and simply put his survival to good use.

 

     When I first met him, it looked to me like he was working alone.  I started hanging around, thinking I was keeping him company, not realizing I needed his company more than he needed mine.  But as I got to know him, I learned that the company of people who'd come before him were there in his office with him every day:  his beloved wife, Dorothea Lange, who died a decade before I arrived; his respected teachers at the University of Wisconsin; Robert Lafollette Jr., who had run special Senate hearings on farm labor between 1936-1940 in which Paul had repeatedly testified.

 

From my wall:  me 'n Paul in 380 Barrows, 1978

 

 

     He had contemporaries there, too, works of people still breathing:  Elias Tuma, then at Davis, who wrote Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform (1965);  Ernesto Galarza, whose Merchants of Labor (1964) about the Bracero Program is as important today as when it was published; and of course, Carey McWilliams, whose Factories in the Field (1971) became the watchwords for farm labor advocates and agribusiness antagonists from then on.

 

     They weren't all academics, either.  They included George Ballis and Ben Yellen, who organized people in Fresno and Imperial Counties respectively and who took large landowners and the Bureau of Reclamation to court for non-enforcement of the law.  There were many elected officials, photographers and journalists as well.  And what I now see that he did in that office was to build evidence of the eternal community of which he was an active member, and they kept him company until he died.

 

     For this concept of the eternal community I owe Parker J. Palmer, a Quaker author quoted in Catherine Whitmire's Plain Living (2001).  He writes "A culture of isolated individualism produces mass conformity because people who think they must bear life all alone are too fearful to take the risks of self-hood.  But people who know that they are embedded in an eternal community are both freed and empowered to become who they were born to be." (from Let Your Life Speak, 1990.)

 

     And that's what I want to create in the old Exchange Building:  a Center where the works of that eternal community concerned with the fates of small towns, small farms and farm workers can be seen and felt.  I want to create a place where Lindsay can learn about the processes that shaped it in the past, the real causes of its decline, and the prospects for its future.  I want that also for the other small towns and places surrounding us, hoping we can work together to change direction, away from growth as the only means for survival, toward a revived rural economy sustaining the qualities of life we enjoy here.

 

     And I want it to be a place where we can educate the cities of the nation about our real worth - you, me, and Paul.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural revivalist who writes and sometimes sings in Lindsay.  You can write to her % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a comment below.



Our Wonderful Lives

Published June 5, 2013 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Last week I wrote about a conversation I had with a good friend, whose comment "We're not going to give up our good lives," had laid a bombshell in my lap.  Sunday I told him I'd written a column trying to dig myself out of the crater it made.

     Never wanting to harm anyone, he was chagrined and apologetic.  A scholarly man, as we talked looking for a better answer, he said "Remember the myth of Sisyphus."

    Philosophy's not my strong suit, so I confessed my memory problem.  He sketched out the story of a man trying to push a giant boulder up a mountain, clearly impossible.  He noted, however, that Sisyphus was at his finest when he was trying.  I saw the similarities but found the metaphor of futility discouraging.

     At some point the conversation shifted from Us ("We're not going to give up our good lives,") to Them:  "They're not going to give up their power until they're forced to," he said, meaning the Big Boys of California agriculture.  The implication was that working to wrest power back is so huge that it isn't worth giving up a portion of our good lives to do it.

     Then it hit me.  "Christianity turns the Greeks on their heads," I said, knowing my brain had taken a leap.  He blinked and asked me to explain.  "If you try to save your life, you'll lose it.  But if you lose your life, you'll have life everlasting."  We let the dust settle and promised to think more about it.

     Thinking about it this morning, I stumbled into George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life."  We see it as a Christmas movie, but it's about a guy who puts himself between greed and the interests of ordinary people who would be hurt if greed was allowed to have its way.  Where George entered my thoughts was the moment when it looks like he's lost the battle.  He suddenly sees his life as a failure, feels his sacrifices have been for nothing.  He gave up the good life in order to serve the people of his community, and now it's all gone.  In a swirling Christmas snowstorm, he prepares to jump off a bridge.

     Clarence the Angel shows him what his community would have been if he had not stood between greed and his people, if he had not witnessed to goodness with his life.  Greed, which has a seed in all of us, had had intercourse with the folks in his town and the people were sour, the town was in ruins.  It's what would have happened if George had left to become an architect and have a good life.  That bad vision shows George that his life as a member of the eternal Community is really quite wonderful after all.

     Some might dispute my interpretation, but I think that's all Jesus meant.  When called, we stand against greed for goodness' sake, giving up opportunities for the good life in order that the common good might thrive.  In the process, we receive a wonderful life.  It doesn't get any better than that.
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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who tries to live the wonderful life in Lindsay.  You can send her your wonderful life stories to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.