VETERAN'S DAY, 2013. The American flags pegged on porches and lawns are blowing in today's beautiful breeze. Yesterday at church we asked the veterans to stand and saluted their sacrifices, their willingness to risk their lives for our sake. My father would have stood with them if he were a church-goer, but instead today he will get a free dinner at Appleby's, a well-deserved salute from corporate America.
As those three beloved men in our congregation who served rose to their feet, my heart went with them, then shrank back into the pew. My brother Dave could have stood there, too, and pigged out with Dad at Appleby's if he had come back from Viet Nam. I carry Dave's wounds in the back of my mind, but the shrapnel my family received is still felt. The sacrifices of risking your life and losing it are not paid by you alone.
The veterans themselves, of course, honor their fallen brothers every year; they know the sacrifices that were made better than we do. That's the real opportunity of Veteran's Day: to ask "What was it really like?" and hear the costs that are paid every time we think war is the answer. The veterans' voices speak for the dead as well as the living.
Veterans also speak for the educational aspect of war. My father came back with stories not just of navigating mined waters and surviving a typhoon in the South China Sea (like one that swallowed two of Admiral Halsey's destroyers, crews and all,) but also of watching boat people at a harbor in North China skimming the water for food in the garbage dumped over the ships' sides. I was raised to think about the poor people in China from his education: never take more than I could eat or leave anything on my plate.
This is Dad's book. He spent several years writing it, and it's been a real gift to our family. Any veteran who spent time on board ship would find company in these pages. Published in 2006 by PublishAmerica, ISBN: 1-4241-4842-1
Was it this pre-kindergarten education around the dinner table that led to my education in land tenure and rural development, which turned me into a rural advocate? I think so. Revisit these words of Paul Taylor with me, written in Berkeley 34 years ago while I watched his dedicated mind at work:
"Search for a congenial or at least tolerable relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time, for that relation largely shapes the relationship of man to man. Societies can become homogeneous or polarized, depending mainly on whether landownership is distributed widely among the many or concentrated in the hands of a few. Throughout time, wide distribution has brought stability, while sustained concentration has jeopardized the peace and fed the forces of revolt and revolution. Our twentieth century is no exception. On the contrary, it has witnessed the largest and most pervasive revolutions of all history in Europe, in Latin America, and in Asia." (Paul S. Taylor, in the Introduction to Essays on Land, Water and the Law in California. New York: Arno Press, 1979.)
Paul told the story of an officer stationed in Viet Nam who recognized that land reform in the South was an alternative to fighting a losing battle with the North, and said so to his superiors. When Paul asked him how far he got with that idea, the officer said "About three minutes at cocktail hour."
It's not just wars that are caused by uneven land distribution, but also terrible poverty. Our dilemmas about immigration are actually driven by land ownership and control problems in Mexico and points south created by American agribusiness firms and global traders. The economic decline of the Valley's small towns is also driven by increasing inequality in land ownership.
When will we get it? Those flags blowing brilliantly in today's breeze prompted a song from the turbulent Viet Nam era: "How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died? The answer, my friends, is blowin' in the wind. The answer is blowin' in the wind."
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Trudy Wischemann is a Gold Star Sister who lives and writes in Lindsay. You can send her your thoughts on Veteran's Day and land reform % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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