Bethlehem

Published Dec. 9, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Slouching, walking, riding a donkey, we’re moving toward Bethlehem in these last weeks of lengthening nights.  We deck the halls with garlands of evergreens and strings of lights, maybe even a little mistletoe to celebrate that first Coming, the immense journey from Nazareth to the City of David, from peasant child to newborn King.  But we also do it to ward off the dark until we can see the days lengthening once again.

     Bethlehem.  All I have to do is hear the word or see that sacred place name to feel the roots of my belief, my faith.  It marks the time as well as the geography of that turning point from old testament to new, the moment when some of God’s children added the word “forgiveness” to their vocabulary.

     How far is Bethlehem from Damascus, I wonder, or from Jerusalem, for that matter?  From Beirut?  Cairo, Baghdad, Istanbul?  In the Bethlehem of our hearts and minds, it is much further than miles.  It is the place where “fear not” was spoken and heard by shepherds and wise men, a plain carpenter and his child bride.  Fear not, because a new way of living together has just been born in this stable, a new, upside-down order where the poor will not be hungry and the rich will slink off into oblivion if they don’t learn to share.  Where the kings of countries will not slaughter their own people, where little children will be suffered instead of die in suffering.

     Some of us are innocent bystanders in this long, wide story.  Others are soldiers in God’s army, at least in their own eyes.  Then there are the nurses and chaplains, the generals with their strategies and the presidents with their real job, to make peace where there is no peace, and none desired.  There are the arms makers, arms sellers, arms negotiators, arms detonators.  There are arms in the hands of innocents and sinners alike in this long, wide story, this historic sweep.  Back and forth we go, corner to corner, dust pans in hand, removing the debris until the next government bombing, the next terrorist attack.  Back and forth, over and over.  The sound of broomstraws is everywhere.

     Bethlehem.  I could not call myself a Christian if it weren’t for the Christmas story.  It entered my heart as a child, long before I would learn about the faith, decades before I discovered God, the Great Spirit, the Light.  Images of Mary astride the unshod donkey in the cold night, finding shelter with the animals instead of humans, the cattle lowing in approval and welcome – those images tell me who I am in ways the cross does not, at least not yet.  The cross is a harder lesson to learn.

     But now is the season of Bethlehem, and making that journey could be the best therapy of all.  When our cities and small towns appear to have been infiltrated by citizens of Damascus and Beirut set on keeping the old, cold war going into eternity, let us mentally follow Joseph and Mary into the unholy world of Herod and Caesar.  Then, following instructions, let us slip away with them unscathed, the infant safe in our arms.  Let us dig in with them for the long haul, keeping watch over our flocks and discerning God’s direction in the constellations, taking heart from the angels and preparing for the cross.

     Bethlehem:  you couldn’t have come at a better time.

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Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte shepherdess who writes.  You can send her your star and angel sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Rescue Kittens

To be published in the Nov. 25, 2015 issue of the Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Weeks ago, when I first wrote about the well-drilling fundraising project to help save a priceless small farmer in Fresno County, Will Scott, Jr., I mentioned that I was bottle-feeding a kitten when I got the call. (Be sure to see 3 entries, below, about this important project!)  At the time, it seemed like a perfect coincidence:  there I was, doing something that makes my heart soft and tender when the heart-opportunity of a lifetime arrived, just in time to keep my mind from jumping off a bridge. 

     Over the weeks since then, it has seemed less of a coincidence.  There seems to be a high correlation between tending little Pipsqueak and his siblings from the late-harvest litter born in my backyard, and getting another call for the next step in rescuing Will.  I don’t pretend to understand it, but I think my observations are reliable. 

     One of the deep joys of shepherding kittens is to watch them play.  At this moment, on a sunny November morning, this little family of five is hard at work playing, learning everything from the art of sneak attacks to escape via the grapevine, guided by Yoda and Chipmunk, the two surviving kittens from the spring litter.  It’s like watching a soccer match or basketball game, they move that fast.  But there’s no winning or losing team.  My heart cheers as I see each one grow in competence. 

     I didn’t expect Yoda or Chipmunk to survive: their six siblings were taken early by a bad respiratory virus following a cold spring rain.  So I simply tried to make them comfortable, washing the pus from their eyes and mucus their noses twice a day and feeding them the best food I could afford, hoping my snuggling would comfort them, if not help boost their immune systems.  When I finally realized they weren’t dying, I took them to our beautiful vet Jamie Wilson, got them the shots they needed, got them neutered to slow down their straying, and now they’re healthy teenagers taking babysitting duty regularly. 

     What I truly learned this summer, however, was that they were helping me survive.  Every time a wave of despair threatened to sink my ship, I’d be drawn away from that mental state by their needs.  Did they have enough water?  Better go check.  Is there shade where they’re sleeping, or are they cooking in the sun?  I kept a syringe in a jar of electrolyte solution on the porch, and more than once pulled them back from the brink of dehydration and death.  But monitoring their condition kept me from sweltering in mine. 

     Then I began to notice other ways I was being rescued.  Re-united with an old friend whose late-life divorce is pending and who I thought needed my company daily via the telephone, I saw that we were helping each other anchor in reality and grow in acceptance of self as well as the world.  What appeared as deathly darkness at the beginning of this year has turned to health-restoring light.  Ending each day talking with Pam has made the beginning of the next one seem more plausible, even hopeful. 

     In our culture, our Thanksgiving traditions mostly focus on celebrating all the good things we’ve been given through the year, and truly, no one in this world is without blessing of some kind.  But not everyone can see that.  Sometimes the gifts come in badly-wrapped packages, looking like time bombs or terrorist attacks.  Sometimes they seem like a case of bad karma.  To most people, having litters of kittens born in your back yard seems like trouble or even outright irresponsibility, and having tried unsuccessfully to prevent it, I confess I wasn’t exactly overjoyed when these litters arrived. 

     But this thanksgiving I’m thanking God for this life-giving intimacy with kittens and old friends, for the revelation that in rescuing others we rescue ourselves.  May your blessings be easy to count and your turkey done to perfection. Thanks for listening to me all this year!

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Trudy Wischemann is a feline shepherdess and rural advocate who also writes to fend off despair.  You can send her your rescue recipes c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

           

 

Good News

     There is good news to report from Lindsay, my adopted home town – more, in fact, than has been making the pages of the newspapers.

 

      I have been thinking a lot about what makes for good news. The sun came up this morning. That’s good news in two ways.  It’s “good” because it’s beneficial: this thing we need even more than food and shelter, this thing we count on so desperately that we take it for granted, has happened yet one more day.  It’s also good because it’s true.  It doesn’t matter which day you read this, it is still true.  If it were false – if it hadn’t happened – you wouldn’t be reading this.

 

      So truth, as well as benefit, are criteria for good news.  I think “wholeness” is a third: a sense of being complete (as much as someone can know the whole story at any given time;) a sense of being thorough, examined from all sides.  Not just the sunny side; not just the dark side.  Both sides.  News from only one side of a story is a half-truth, which leaves much too much room for truth’s opposite.

 

      There was good news to report from the Oct. 27^th Lindsay City Council meeting, but all the papers missed it.  The forces behind the current city administration had taken advantage of the power of the so-called social media (which, with its lack of accountability, might better be called “anti-social,”) to spread the rumor that the city council wanted to shut down the McDermont Field House.  The rumor, of course, pinpointed the three councilmembers who have been charged with everything from dysfunctionality to conspiracy (not to mention the false charge and arrest for felony embezzlement of Councilman Mecum a year and a half ago,) which was not good news under any of my three criteria, above.  That’s what I mean by lack of accountability.  It was bad.

 

      How this bad news got converted into good news had a touch of gospel in it.  Our mayor, Ramona Padilla, with all her education, compassion and humanity, took that bull by the horns and said, essentially, “We are not going to be gored by this.”  She called it by its true name – a falsehood, a rumor intentionally spread to make real conversation impossible about the problem of making McDermont a financially responsible part of this city – and then asked each councilmember to say whether or not they had ever mentioned the possibility of closure.  Not one had.

 

       By taking control of that ill wind at the very beginning of the meeting, she turned what could have been just another public brawl into a real community conversation about the problems and opportunities of that facility.  It went on for almost an hour, which was not bad since it was at least five years overdue, if not ten.  She took full advantage of the collection of interested people who had gathered to protest, and turned them into willing participants in shaping our future, looking for ways to make that albatross fly. (Albatrosses can fly, you know – they don’t have to just hang around your neck.)

 

      Did you read that story anywhere?  I didn’t.

 

      And what a lost opportunity that was.  Here the real media could have carried some good news, something readers are always clamoring for.  Instead, they have chosen to characterize the current struggle to make better budgets, better rules, better public relations, better balances of power – they are characterizing this as dysfunctional, as “not able to agree on anything.”  It’s the same blindness that characterized past councils’ rubber stamp work as progressive.  It’s bad news.

 

      Bad enough to make me not want to read the newspaper.

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Trudy Wischemann is a born reader who writes for a life, not a living.  You can send her your observations of good news c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

We Drill for Will

Farmers Saving Farmers, Redeeming Us All


     Will Scott, Jr., Fresno organic grower of soul food, community farm activist and president of the African-American Farmers of California, is about to go out of business for lack of water.  (For an overview of his efforts, visit www.scottfamilyfarms.net.)  Featured in the Fresno Bee's "Faces of the Drought," Will was quoted as saying  "We're on the verge of losing a lot."  (See also this blog's entries "Drill for Will" and "Approaching Rain" in October.)


     Paul Buxman, Dinuba organic tree fruit grower, small farm organizer and Valley farmscape painter extraordinaire, heard the news and said "The community can't afford to lose this man."  So he's launched a fund drive to deepen Will's well to keep Will where the community needs him:  on his farm. (For two beautiful television reports on this project, visit http://abc30.com/news/drought-hasnt-dried-up-dinuba-farmers-generous-spirit/1010605 and http://abc30.com/news/generous-response-to-valley-farmers-well-fund/1020474/.)  See and hear also Alice Daniel's fantastic piece of radio journalism for KQED's "California Report" at http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/11/07/drill-for-will-get-this-farmer-some-water/. 

    
     For a $50 contribution (roughly equal to one foot of well deepened,) Paul is offering a 16x20 lithograph of either "Approaching Rain" or "After the Rain."  For a $75 contribution, a person can choose one of three 18x24 lithographs:  "Swedish Homestead," "Autumn Afternoon," and "Approach to Reedley."  The lithographs are signed and numbered, wrapped in acetate and backed with museum-quality board, ready for framing.  (For a large view of Paul's paintings, visit www.shinnphoto.com/Paul-Buxman; unfortunately, this blogsite isn't allowing me to insert photos today!)


               We  Can  Help ! ! !  Even us non-farmers ! ! !
    
     Any contribution will be gratefully accepted.  Make your check payable to Will Scott, Jr.  with "Drill for Will" or well fund written in the memo.  Send it to Paul Buxman, Sweet Home Ranch, 4399 Avenue 400, Dinuba CA 93618, and include your name, address and phone number to arrange for pick-up of the lithographs. 


     If you'd like to taste the Buxmans' fruit of their labors, literally, plan on attending their annual Art Show and Holiday Gift Sale, November 27 and 28, featuring Paul's original oil paintings (many new ones this year!), lithographs and art cards, plus farm-crafted foods and gifts from Sweet Home Ranch and neighboring farms.  Enjoy the beauty of the farm, the tastes of home, and visits with neighbors and friends.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes from her adopted home town of Lindsay.  You can send her your ideas to raise money and lower Will's well c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Writing the Truth

Published Oct. 28, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I don’t know how many of you imagine seeing your words, your thoughts, or even an image of yourself in the newspaper, but there are days when I find that prospect daunting.  

            Take this week for example.  If I ramble on about the beauties of waiting for TrickerTreaters at my door, will that enflame the Anti-Halloweeners?  If I remind readers that 4 months ago, Lindsay City Finance Director Tamara Laken promised to retire in August of this year and that, chances are, her re-announced retirement come January (reported in last week’s edition) is yet another step in a plan preconceived by the Insiders last spring to merge the city manager and finance director positions, will you throw up your hands in disgust, thinking all I ever do is complain?

            For eight years now I have tried to use this column (and its predecessor, “HomePages”) to present pieces of the truth about our lives in this region that were not readily available elsewhere.  Finding words for these pieces has been a challenge and a gift.  Every time I think otherwise, someone will stop me in line at RN Market or in the aisles of Rite Aid and say “I read your piece in the paper last week.”  Sometimes people even thank me.  I have never been accosted, not even in True Value Hardware.

            Because I don’t just report facts but also evaluate them and the meaning they might have for our community and our region, my writing falls under the category of “editorial,” or “opinion.”  I am grateful to have a place in that category, hopefully one that helps enlarge the truth in the facts found elsewhere on these pages.  

            It’s true that some opinion finds its way into the news reporting of this paper where it might not belong.  But this is a small town newspaper serving many small towns, and praise is just danged hard to come by anywhere else.  Hopefully we know each other well enough to know when someone’s glamorizing the facts with their own point of view, and take it with a grain of salt.  That’s what life here’s all about.

            The question I have for you, dear readers, is this:  What are we to do with the truth when we think we’ve read it?  I face this question constantly when I read others’ words on the printed page, whether those be Katha Pollitt’s in The Nation or Jim Hightower’s LowDown.  Would it be a good idea to witness the monthly County Board of Supervisors’ meetings or attend the Planning Commission hearings, become an alternate for TCAG?  Respond to the Tulare County Citizens for Responsible Growth many email alerts?  Write letters to the editors?

            I think everybody’s got to find their own answer to that question.  My only hope in writing the truth as best I possibly can is that the truth be read and understood as best it possibly can.  From there, the truth becomes community property and community responsibility.  My job is done, and our job begins.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can send her your truths c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Second Rain

Published Oct. 21, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


            Last Wednesday’s rain started in the night, our second rain of the new water year.  It kept me awake, hoping for thunderous downpours to follow the thunder.  They didn’t come until later in the day, several cloudbursts that temporarily filled the gutters on Tulare Road all the way to the center line.  All totaled, however, we really only got pennies from heaven, not the hundreds of dollars’ worth we need to repay our debt to the reservoirs and groundwater table.  But those pennies were welcome anyway.

            I loved how it made the morning smell.  I loved how it settled the dust.  I loved how the trees’ fairy fingers, lightened of their dirt, waved happily in response to the unstable air mass moving through our region.  And despite the possibility that El Nino will evaporate over the Pacific, I enjoyed my quiet anticipation of more to come.

            “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” a friend who farms told me last week.  “Explain,” I asked.  “Even if we get enough rain to fill the reservoirs, it’s going to be years before the well water comes back.  Meanwhile, those people who’ve been just hanging on, paying sky-high prices for water hoping to last one more year, are going to give up . . . .”  And there he stopped, letting me fill in the blank.

            It’s the small farmers we both worry about, the people who make their homes and lives here, tilling the soil and tending the groves.  It’s those people who have helped fill the pews in the past and the slots in volunteer fire departments, manned school boards and irrigation districts, run packinghouse meetings.  Those people who stop what they’re doing to help a stranger on the side of the road, and talk for hours standing in each others’ driveways.  I’m for them even if I don’t like the way they vote, the way they talk about social issues, or the stubborn independence that makes organizing them in their own interests harder than herding cats.

            I’m for them because the small towns need them, and I’m for small towns.  This is true even if I don’t like the non-inclusive social settings characteristic of small towns and the tendency of their citizens to minimize horizons.  I’m for small towns because they provide the incubators people need to become human, including participation in society.  I’m for them because they’re knowable environments, and I think intimacy with our environment is a human need.  I’m for them because, despite what most people think, democracy is still possible here if - and this is a big If - there is not a huge disparity in wealth, if the gap between the richest and the poorest is not too wide to cross.

            Mayor Padilla took a bold step toward re-democratizing Lindsay last week when she put the subject of hiring a permanent city manager on the agenda.  The old guard tried to block it, including the current interim city manager, Bill Zigler (who has no training or experience in being a city manager, as well as no training in city planning, the well-paid position he’s held here for years.)   He was aided by at least one long-term council member.  During the meeting, objections were raised about the salary cost and the timing, both red herrings.  The old guard appears to fear someone from the outside coming in and seeing our condition, while the new guard puts hope in that, in the re-establishment of some kind of fiscal sanity and social awareness in the person responsible for running our town.  

            I share that hope.  It may seem like too little too late, with many horses already well down the road, the barn door flapping in their wind.  But it certainly is not too soon.  May Mayor Padilla’s efforts be rewarded with public support.  Watch for notice of a special study session on the hiring process, and come add your voice to the mix.  Help settle the dust:  be like the rain, a drop here, half an inch there, pennies from heaven. 

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Trudy Wischemann is a small farm town advocate who writes.  You can send her your rain reveries c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Approaching Rain

For the Oct. 14, 2015 issue of the Foothills Sun-Gazette
    
     Thin blades of bright green grass have come up through the bent-over dry stalks in my backyard this past week, responding to last Sunday’s rain.  It’s amazing how the sight of baby wild oats can produce hope, but it has.
    
    Those thin green blades are an antidote to despair in a way, like taking aspirin for a headache.  We’ve submerged much of our despair about the drought, I think, have tried to hold its head underwater while we wait for good news that it was just a mirage.  Maybe the despair will drown, we think, while continuing on with our lives as if we weren’t under environmental siege.
       
     Drought despair is what Paul Buxman’s project “Drill for Will” washed downriver for me two weeks ago (see last week’s column below.)  Paul has been an antidote to my despair before:  in 2003, after yet another freeze made our small-scale citrus growers want to throw in the towel, he came to our Lindsay Lighthouse Breakfast meeting to embolden the members.  “Just try and do something for 2 hours a day that could bring in some money,” he advised, speaking from first-hand experience as a plum grower too subject to hail.
    
     Paul’s paintings are an antidote to another kind of despair that many of us feel:  that our landscape, our precious, verdant agricultural bread-basket-of-the-world, hands-on-the-plow landscape is vanishing.  It is vanishing:  Bill Preston, the author of Vanishing Landscapes: Land and Life in the Tulare Lake Basin (1981,) can barely stand to visit this place for the pain these losses inflict on his heart.  But Paul, in painting them, has made a testimony to their importance.  Several of his paintings bear this witness in the offices of senators and other government officials in Sacramento and Washington.  “This is a reminder of how you need to vote,” he’s told several elected representatives as he handed over the paintings to their new owners.
    
     “Approaching Rain” is the title of one of the paintings reproduced as lithographs that Paul is giving in exchange for financial contributions to deepen the wells of Will Scott, Jr., the black organic grower and small-farm activist near Raisin City who is in danger of being driven out of business next year for lack of water.  This painting shows a small farm against a darkened horizon that could bring disaster as well as blessing, which we might see differently now after four years of little rain.  “After the Rain,” “Autumn Afternoon,” and “Homestead” (which portrays raisins drying in the sun,) are the titles of the other three.
    
     These four paintings are from the 1980’s and were chosen for reproduction because Paul felt they best represented both his style and his subject.  Normally these lithographs sell for several hundred dollars each.  As a quartet, they represent the passion and skill of this artist/tree fruit grower who knows the lay of our land like no other.
    
     “Man, you’re making history,” an old gentleman told Paul last week while he was out painting over on the Kings River delta.  “No,” Paul said, “but I am recording it.”
    
     Actually, I think the gentleman had it right.  It’s radical, what Paul’s doing by painting landscapes we’re all afraid to acknowledge that we love, and then putting them up for people to see and buy.  It’s radical, handing out the fruit of his labors for free to help save another farmer and small-farm activist who tells people that black farmers’ lives matter, and black peoples’ diets do, too.  It’s even radical to hope that deepening a well will drive off the wolf at that farmer’s door, to hope that there is enough rain approaching to satisfy the wants of many and keep the big boys from sucking everyone’s wells dry.
    
     If making that kind of history appeals to you, send your checks to Paul Buxman, Sweet Home Ranch, 4399 Ave. 400, Dinuba CA 93618.  Make the checks payable to “Will Scott, Jr.,” with “well fund” written in the memo space.  Include your name, address and phone number to arrange for pick-up of the lithographs, one for each foot of well to be drilled (currently estimated at $50/foot.)  Make history and drown despair:  collect all four!

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Trudy Wischemann is a small-farm/rural advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your ideas for turning drought despair into hope c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Drill for Will

Published Oct. 7, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I was bottle feeding a kitten on the back step when I heard Paul Buxman’s voice talking into the answering machine Tuesday.  I caught the phone before he finished, wanting to catch whatever wave he was riding.  This one was tidal.

     “Do you know the name Will Scott Jr.?” he asked.  A two-second mental search produced 149 entries for “Will,” “Scott” and “Jr.” but zero for all three together.  When Paul told me some of the details, however, I realized I’d been clipping articles on Will for years.

     Will Scott Jr. is a black organic small-scale farmer near Raisin City who’s been actively getting people back on the land, particularly other black farmers and Fresno’s urban youth.  He started farming 45 acres after he retired from the phone company, growing vegetables once common in the diets of rural black people that had kept them healthy, selling them at the Mandela farmers market in Oakland where those now-urban black folks could benefit.  He organized black farmers in the Fresno area to provide much-needed support, and began training black youth to farm, reclaiming the invaluable parts of their rural roots (go to his website, www.scottfamilyfarms.net, to see some of his efforts.)

     But now his well is going dry.  This year he was able to farm only 5 of his 45 acres, and his future looks bad.  Featured recently as one of the “Faces of the Drought,” he was quoted as saying “We’re on the verge of losing a lot.”

     I don’t think he was referring simply to himself.  The loss of too many of our remaining small farms in this drought, with its uncertainties of water supply in the future and the groundwater robbers and high-dollar land speculators acting like vultures, has been giving me nightmares 24/7, but that awareness is largely missing in the media.  I think his sentence captures it perfectly.

     But Paul Buxman saw or heard that sentence and the facts about his well, and it lit his jets.  Paul doesn’t need a burning bush to get his attention:  the fire burns inside him, fuels his every step.  This one started him on a marathon, and if we follow his lead, we’re all going to finish first.

     “We can’t lose this man,” he said.  “We’re going to raise $40,000 to deepen his well, and this is how we’re going to do it.  I’m going to offer signed and numbered lithographs of four of my paintings, one for each foot of well drilled, which is around $50.  All we need is to get the word out,” noting that’s where I come in. 

     But before I could get one word on paper, Paul had recruited Alice Daniel of NPR’s “California Report” and Dale Yurong of Ch. 30 Action News (to view Yurong’s beautiful piece, go to www.abc30.com and look for “Drought Hasn’t Dried Up Dinuba Farmer’s Generous Spirit.”)  Thirty minutes after Yurong’s piece aired on TV Wednesday, a man drove to Paul’s house with a $100 check.  “I hope this primes the pump,” he said seriously.  He went home with two Buxman lithographs, portrayals of the very human landscape we’re trying to save.  I have no doubt that, before this is over, we’ll be able to drill a well to China if we have to. 

     Why would Paul Buxman go to this level?  Let’s just say it takes one to know one.  Paul began farming organically when he discovered too many friends with cancer.  He organized small family farmers needing support into a marketing co-op called “California Clean,” whose motto is “We won’t charge you extra for not poisoning your food.”  He’s taught urban youth the joys of farming, painting and cooking on his Sweet Home Ranch with his wife Ruth, and participated in innumerable festivals, conferences and workshops concerned for our agrarian future, including the Forum on Church and Land in 1992 (which I have mentioned in this column more than once.)

     How deep will we go?  Together, it won’t take much to Drill for Will the well he needs to keep going.  If you’d love to help and have a piece of this beautiful history to hang on your wall, watch this column for further details or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com for up-to-the-minute news.  As Paul said, in this drought it’s not hard to paint yourself into a corner, but maybe we can paint Will, literally, out of this one.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who is grateful for this ray of hope.  You can send your rays to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below. 

Sacred Elephant

Published Sept. 30, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There was no physical violence at the Lindsay City Council meeting last week, but a subtle kind of civil war did break out.  I think it was healthy, and long overdue.

     Two issues were discussed:  broken sidewalks and increasing the sales tax, seemingly unrelated.  But a third raised its ugly head, this community’s elephant in the room:  McDermont Field House and its little sister, the Wellness Center.

     There is no question but that these two facilities have added to the community’s quality of life in some ways.  However, they have seriously detracted from our financial well-being, and that’s the part no one wants to talk about, at least not the city’s staff.  And no one probably would talk about it, except that the chronic budget deficit they’ve created constantly “forces” us to take action against the working poor.

     Let’s start with the sidewalks.  About twenty people came to Tuesday night’s meeting who had received threatening letters from the city about fixing their sidewalks.  They live on Sweet Brier Ave., the street that leads to McDermont from Tulare Road.  It’s an old neighborhood with old sidewalks on a narrow street lined with modest houses and small yards.  Until McDermont was constructed, it was also quiet, with little traffic.  Now it is busy, parking is congested on ordinary days, non-existent on days with big events.  Residents complain of having to clean up their yards of vomit and urine as well as fast food trash after those events, not to mention suffering the noise from them.  And now they have less than 60 days to fix the sidewalks that have needed repair for decades.

     Several Sweet Brier residents spoke of relatives living on other streets who have had their sidewalks fixed by the city free of charge, the result of some of this town’s transportation fund improvements.  “That doesn’t matter,” city staff said in effect, “we’re forced by state law to impose this on you now because we are being forced by the actions of an undesirable individual to make them ADA compliant.”  The staff’s shameless attempts to place responsibility for their action (sending the letters) on the squeaky man in the wheelchair, rather than take responsibility for their inaction (i.e., neglecting the city’s infrastructure while they built this castle in the air,) was disgusting.  

     Moving on to the proposed sales tax increase, they said, in effect “ It won’t affect you much, because people in other cities like Tulare and Porterville, even Dinuba, already pay higher sales tax, and you do, too, when you shop there, so no biggy.  We’ll have to spend about $30 K to do it right,” (those sidewalks on Sweet Brier are estimated to cost about $50K total,) “and of course it’s totally up to the voters to approve it (which, by the way, they refused to do in 2008, but that was probably because we didn’t pitch it right.)”  After a brief pause to catch their breaths, Mr. Zigler politely concluded “We’re looking to Council for direction.” 

     The Council gave them direction: they said No Way.  In a vote requiring 4 yesses, they got only two (Salinas and Kimball,) while Sanchez and Mecum turned thumbs down.  The dollar amount the staff had estimated the increased sales tax would produce was between $188K (for .25%) and $378K (for .50%.)  Based on figures from 2013, (the most recent available,) these numbers may overestimate the dollars to be generated, given the decline in Lindsay’s business climate over the last 2 years.

     Had the staff proposed the tax increase for a specific purpose, however (as many of those cities with higher sales tax have done,) say, fixing the sidewalks in the poorest neighborhoods, it might have been a different story.  But considering that we still subsidized McDermont $225K annually from the General Fund – a quarter of a million dollars yearly – you can see why the Great White Elephant was called out for review.

     And that’s when the fighting broke out in the audience between the beneficiaries and the victims.  Most of the people who now must come up with hundreds of non-existent dollars to fix sidewalks cannot afford to participate in McDermont’s benefits or those of the Wellness Center.  The opportunity costs of building these two behemoths have caused our financial crisis and now have come due.  The city staff is wanting to slough the burden to those least able to bear it, whether that be for fixing sidewalks or the higher costs of gasoline, medicine, toilet paper and toothpaste – what few taxable items we are still able to purchase within these city limits.

     When we find a city manager who can see through the eyes of the poorest residents and construct solutions to help us all rise together, then we’ll have a city worth supporting.  Until then, our job is to keep naming the elephants in the room, sacred or otherwise.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your elephant sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Land Theology

Published Sept. 23, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

“Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!  Isaiah 5:8

     Last week I wrote about land tenure and its importance, not just in the book I’m working on but also in our individual lives and in our communities.  What I didn’t fully understand when I began this book project, however, was that concerns over land tenure go all the way back to biblical times, particularly concentrated, absentee land ownership.

     Before Jesus, before Isaiah and Jeremiah, concentration of control over the best, most productive agricultural holy lands by a few individuals created impoverished conditions for the rural peasants and the mass of urban dwellers.  That’s what made those prophets cry out.  They were crying out not just against the injustices created, but also for the covenant broken, the one the Israelites made with God before they crossed the River Jordan to occupy the Promised Land.   These are the roots of what has come to be known as “land theology.”

     Up to a point, I may be excused for my ignorance 25 years ago.  My parents were suspicious of bible thumpers, and that carried over to the text itself.  Up to a point, you who have read the Bible all of your lives may also be excused, because most theologians over the last 2000 years have also missed that message.  In that scholarly vacuum, I guess our preachers may also be excused.  After all, in the early centuries of Christianity, the Church itself was a large landholder and the source of permission for European explorers to seize the land of natives in the New World, creating landlessness and injustices we still have not lived down. 

    In 1977 an Old Testament scholar named Walter Brueggemann published a book called The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith.  In it he laid the foundation for what would become “land theology.”  My Methodist preacher friend John Pitney picked up that ball and carried it to the Forum on Church and Land in Fresno, where I first heard the message in 1992.  Another Old Testament scholar, Marvin Chaney, presented his research there on the land tenure conditions in 8^th Century BC Palestine, providing a framework for us to compare with California’s state of large-scale, industrialized agriculture.  I left that event physically, emotionally and intellectually transformed, i.e., converted.

     But I think what made that conversion possible was a moment 14 years before, in the office of a retired Berkeley economics professor, Paul Taylor.  I was there to learn about federal reclamation law from him, and to help his efforts in any way I, as an untutored 28-year-old, could.  He’d been invited by Cornell historian Paul Wallace Gates to publish his collection of law journal articles on California water and the 160-acre limitation.  His task that day was to start to write the introduction to this volume of works that spanned more than 20 years, a culmination of his passion and his scholarship.  I was there to help type.

     He got a few sheets of yellow unlined paper, got his pen, and began to think.  Then he looked up at his bookshelf which spanned the entire wall, floor to ceiling, and said “Where’s my Bible?”  At Berkeley I’d never heard an academic ask that question, and had no idea why he wanted it, but joined him in the search until he realized it was at home.

     The next day he returned to the office with Isaiah 5:8 written on a 2x2 yellow Post-it.  I typed it at the top of the page, followed by two other quotes he’d chosen, a passage from the 1902 Reclamation Act and a sentence from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958.  His eyes asked for my approval, but I still didn’t understand what it meant, particularly Isaiah.  He looked at me kindly then and said “Laying house to house, field to field – that’s when people buy up all the land.”  That was my real introduction to land theology, there in the UCB Department of Economics at the knee of a gentle genius from Iowa.

     And now I carry the torch myself.  The truth will not only set you free:  it can set you on fire.  Run the course.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your flaming visions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Property Rights and Community Wrongs

Published Sept. 16, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

            “Search for a congenial relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time, for that relation largely shapes the relation between man and man.”  Paul Schuster Taylor, 1979

 

     “What’s your book about?” people ask when I tell them I’m working on one.  I usually say “agriculture and the common good,” sometimes adding a few items lodged under that umbrella like “small farms,” “water,” and “sustainability.”  But the thread running through it all is land tenure.

     “Land tenure” is not a term most people use, although it applies to every single one of us.  It means the system that determines peoples’ access to land, which is the source of all wealth as well as subsistence, and the subcategories of relationships determined by that system.

            In this country, the system of private property determines individuals’ access to land except where government control has interceded (like school grounds or Yosemite National Park, for instance.)  The subcategories in our system are “landed,” “tenant,” and “landless” or “homeless.”  The concept of private property is so important to our entire socio-political-economic system that we take it for granted, almost god-given.  To criticize private property here, even if the intent is to help, is like burning the flag.  

            What’s good about private property (i.e., individual ownership,) particularly when we’re talking about land, however, isn’t always good for the community. One of the worst things for any given community is when some of its land (or most, or all, as in "company towns,") is owned by people who do not live within it, often referred to as “absentee ownership.”  What’s wrong about it is that decisions for the land’s use by the absentee owner are made in a vacuum of knowledge about the community’s needs and beyond the community’s ability to influence those decisions, to encourage or coerce the owner to care about the effects of those decisions on people within the community or the community as a whole.

            Last week’s paper carried a wonderful example of the importance of land tenure in a beautifully written letter to the editor by Chris and Sally Brewer regarding the closure of Exeter’s True Value Hardware.  The letter pointed to a cause the previous week’s news article had skimmed over lightly:  the landowner’s decision to raise the rent 40%, with two weeks’ notice.  It’s the kind of action landowners take when they want to remove the tenant and do not have cause to evict. 

            The Brewers then went on to suggest a motive - to get a tax write-off for having an empty building - and to flush out the implications of that for the community (lost sales tax revenues, the impacts on other businesses of having a large empty building downtown) as well as for the business owners themselves (lost source of income and community identity.)  They then went on to express the hope that “the building owner who started this self-centered and thoughtless action realizes the extent and harm his actions have caused good people and a good community.”

            That last sentence might have some impact if the current owners are local.  The Brewers’ letter did not name or identify the location of the current owners, only that the former owners (who also had owned the hardware business housed there) sold the building several years ago.  This is simply to say that I do not know if the current owners are absentee, or simply acting like it.  My experiences here in Lindsay document that local owners can be as oblivious to the community’s welfare as absentee owners can.

            But it’s a question we should ask.  Who will look out for the needs of the community when the landowners of its spaces live too far away to know or care?

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Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes.  You can send your empty building nightmares to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247

 

           

Studebaker Desert

Published Sept. 9, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The other night I was scanning my bookshelves for pieces I might have left out of my collection of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good.  When my eyes lit on it, my fingers reached for Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, a book so dense with the common bad of water politics it could take a month of reading to find a few pages to excerpt.

     Published in 1986, the book was described as “a savagely witty history of America’s reckless depletion of its water resources,” in Newsday.  The Washington Post Book Review called it “a highly partisan, wonderfully researched portrayal of the damming, diverting and dirtying of western rivers.”  Publishers Weekly said “This timely and important book should be required reading for all citizens.”

     Although I think Publishers Weekly was right, I doubt the book was well read here in the Valley.  Almost 30 years later many of our citizens are still making the same kind of arguments for more dams that Reisner showed were reasonless and irrational, in massive denial of the facts of water’s availability and the costs to develop it.  The reason for making those arguments still exist - that dams can make a few people temporarily rich - but 30 years later those people are even smaller in number.  Unfortunately, they may be more powerful.

     I grew up in the 1950’s, when big water projects like the CVP here and Bonneville in the Pacific Northwest were viewed as heroic and totally positive undertakings designed to create and spread wealth among the western citizenry.  I remember watching newsreels in school about their physical construction and economic contributions, and I believed every word of it.  I chose Grand Coulee Dam as the subject of the first report I wrote in grade school.  A decade earlier that same spirit had captured Woody Guthrie, who worked for the feds for a month putting this heroism and hope into song.

     But by the 1980’s the promises showed their true colors and the costs had begun to show up.  In Reisner’s introduction, “A semidesert with a Desert Heart,” we can see why:

            “One does not really conquer a place like (California.)  One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it.... The only way to make the region over is to irrigate it.  But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move... The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-sized section green - and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater.  But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels . . . has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska. 

            “What they seem not to understand,” he continues, “is how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made.  Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success we have had in reclaiming the American desert.  But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history - Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia; the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam - before they collapsed.”

           

     How to live here in this place, within the limits nature provides and God or someone has allowed us to stretch well beyond, is a question this drought has provided for us to ponder.  If we respond rightly, I think we may be finding ourselves downsizing and going backward to something once more common than the Cadillac.

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Trudy Wischemann is an old car lover who writes.  You can send her your more politically correct water conservation ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.