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.
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