People Will Come

Published July 22, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
    
     “People don’t come to the city council meetings,” our editor Reggie Ellis told me years ago, point blank.  “That’s what’s wrong with Lindsay.  People don’t come to the council meetings, so the City can get away with anything.”  At that point I’d attended only one during the whole time I’d lived here, so I felt justly accused.
    
     Over the past four and a half years, I’ve attended most of those meetings, and I can tell you that, in general, he is right.  From late 2010 to the election in 2012, when the City’s past unethical (and sometimes illegal) activities were being uncovered, a small group of community members kept watch.  Public interest and attendance has waned over the past year and a half as the community gained a sense of stability and hope for progressive reforms.  But with Rich Wilkinson’s departure, a new group of citizens has shown up, expressing strong interest in the selection of the new city manager.
    
     It should be noted that these two groups have opposite interests.  The earlier group was interested in changing the status quo and making the city more responsive to the majority of the people who live here.  The current group has organized to help maintain the status quo, which primarily serves the financial interests of property owners.
    
     People came to last Tuesday night’s council meeting, people from both groups.  In fact, it was a standing-room-only crowd.  Folks from the citizens’ group sat in the rows of chairs, no doubt relieved to hear the appointment of city planner Bill Zigler to the position of interim city manager, insuring (if only briefly) that the future will look very much like the past.  Interspersed in the chairs and standing in a line blanketing the back wall of the chambers, however, were members from a neighborhood in the community who had come en masse to ask to have their street repaved.
    
     Zigler’s appointment was not music to my ears: it was like radio static turned up full blast.  Most of the projects I have fought for the past 4 years came from his desk: the demolition of the Citrus Exchange Building, the elimination of diagonal parking spaces downtown for bike lanes, the proposed roundabout at Hermosa and Westwood, the re-alignment of Highway 65 a mile west of the entrance into town - not to mention various housing projects that hit the fan after the 2008 housing market collapse.  His naming to the position felt like defeat.  I got up to leave.
    
     But on my way out the door, a woman standing at the back of the room asked me in Spanish when they could speak.  She showed me the petitions the neighbors had signed and delivered to the city manager’s desk asking to have Linda Vista repaved.  After I realized how important it was that these citizens had gathered and come to the meeting, I asked Mayor Padilla to re-open the public comment period to allow them to voice their concerns.  Mr. Zigler announced that they had received their petition, as if that was enough, but Mayor Padilla went ahead anyway, inviting people to come to the microphone.  We had no translator present, so one of the bilingual neighbors spoke, then translated for the others.  My feeling of defeat was transformed to triumph.
    
     One of the reasons people haven’t come to the Lindsay City Council meetings is that they have not been welcome.  There are many things we can do to make the meetings more accessible to the public, but the most important thing for the public to know is that they are welcome. I truly believe that, if we make the meetings more user-friendly to the public and responsive to their needs, people will come.  Like James Earl Jones said in Kevin Costner’s movie Field of Dreams, “Oh, people will come, Ray, people will most certainly come.”

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Trudy Wischemann is an agrarian dreamer who writers.  Send her your sightings of equality c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

           

 

 

Monsters

Published July 8, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Be careful what you wish for,” an old saying cautions in the back of my mind.  We might want to pay heed to that bit of wisdom when hoping to lure money into a community. 
    
     Lindsay’s past redevelopment strategies were based on the hope of attracting middle class folks to re-populate the town.  When the housing market ballooned, then popped, what we had left was a lot of poorer, working class people paying mortgages far too high for their incomes and massive civic indebtedness.  The high-rollers left to live and spend somewhere else.
    
     The price for agricultural land has recently ballooned to 10 times what it was a decade ago.  Certainly there are those who welcome the investors who are making rich men out of former farmers and previously starving realtors, assuming this new wealth will trickle through the community’s hands somehow, some way.  But I see this hot air balloon as a community crisis in the making.
    
     When I ask what has driven the per-acre prices from $3,000 to $30,000, I am told it is the presence of investors (including foreign) with too much money and no safe place to put it.  In the mid-1980’s, the presence of foreign investors buying up Valley farm land for big bucks sent red alerts through the media and the populace, as did the presence of  US insurance companies and doctors & dentists following their example.  We understood it then as an incursion into the rural economy that could and eventually would displace other members of that financial ecosystem:  family farmers, farm workers, local processors and town businesses, even local governments.
    
     An article in the current issue of The Nation describes how this works in urban areas.  “How to Dump Tenants and Make a Fortune:  The chaotic, abusive process by which New York’s affordable housing is vanishing,” by D.W. Gibson (July 6/13, 2015) describes the current assault of investors on residential real estate.  Although almost half of the apartments in that city’s five boroughs - a million units in total - have been under rent-stabilization regulations for decades, making it possible for working and middle class families to live there, the pressure of money is crumbling those regulations.  “That number is falling quickly,” Gibson states, “as New York’s high-end housing market continues to balloon from the heat of global capital.”  The article’s examples of tactics used by these investors to rid themselves of lower-paying residents are inhuman.

     Global capital.  I was glad to have a name for it finally, this faceless force having its way with ag land, our primary resource.  I fear that one of the real motives behind these high prices is the value of groundwater pumped for sale on the open market, not the productive capability of land.  I fear that, by the time these investors are through re-arranging the Valley’s waterscape to suit their income needs, what’s left of our rural economy won’t be worth what you can wring from a wet washrag.      

     “Global capital” has some problems as a name, however.  It depersonalizes the force, makes it less subject to our protests, makes us feel less able to object.  I’d like to provide an alternative handle, borrowing a line from John Pitney’s “Farmchild Song:”  monsters.  “Daddy, I see monsters in the land,” the son sings after listening to his parents talk about Uncle Cargill and how their farm operations are impinged upon by global ag conglomerates.  

     Let us think about how we might address these monsters moving into our land, and how we might compel them to be neighbors instead.

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

The Four Freedoms

Published July 1, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “What are we doing permitting fireworks in this drought year?  It’s so dry...” said a woman in the back of the Lindsay city council chambers on June 9th.  She didn’t speak up, so no one officially heard or answered, and so our freedom to sell and buy fireworks was approved once again.  But that freedom is not one of the basic four.

     The four freedoms are worth thinking about during this Independence Day week.  First enunciated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in January of 1941 prior to our entry into World War II, the four freedoms rang like liberty bells through the hallways of Congress and our homes that entire decade.  Speaking them brought tears to people’s eyes and stirred hearts as much as the raising of the flag.  Normal Rockwell captured them beautifully in four paintings; Dorothea Lange did the same in photographs.  Yet we hardly ever hear of them now.  I had to look them up to get them right.

           

     The four freedoms are delicately balanced like points on a compass.  Two - the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion - are guaranteed in our constitution (or at least, the right to exercise them is.)  The other two - the freedom from fear and the freedom from want - come from a dream, the dream of equality that dreamed Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as many others.  The dream of World War II was that, in defeating the tyrants on the opposite sides of each ocean surrounding us, we would make the world safe for democracy.  Then all people would have not only the rights to speak and to pray but also the rights to a roof over their heads, food on the table, and (since everyone had the basic necessities,) to live with no wolf at the door.

     Seven decades after that war’s conclusion, it would be hard to argue that we won.  We may have won the majority of the battles, the deciding victories, defeated the German and Japanese tyrants and squelched their allies.  But in many places around the globe, speech and prayer are still dictated, while fear and want run rampant.  Voting in elections still can get you killed, as can obtaining a loaf of bread or falling asleep in the wrong place.

     I think our Independence rating is fairly questionable even here.  I regularly encourage people to exercise their freedom of speech at city council meetings, but few take me up on the offer, pleading one kind of fear or another.  There are countless Christian churches in which to pray and tithe, but if your faith is Muslim, you might think twice before attending in some states.  A large percentage of this country’s children suffer from hunger:  hunger for food and hunger for nurturance, while most of the rest suffer from wanting, born with the consumer virus.  And how many people do you know who are free from fear?

     It strikes me that there could be a relationship between the two sets of freedoms.  Perhaps the freedoms from fear and want grow dim as we forget to exercise the freedoms of speech and religion.  Perhaps the dream goes into a nosedive as we forget who we are as Americans and people of God.  Perhaps there is no freedom from fear or want when we abdicate the civic auditoriums and faithful pews, when we hear no words crying for equality from the podiums and pulpits.  Perhaps there’s a relationship, a delicate balance like the four points of the compass.

     Think about your freedoms as you light off your fireworks and light up your barbeques this weekend.

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Trudy Wischemann is a patriotic writer in Lindsay.  You can send her your list of freedom-generating ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Do Re Mi

Published June 17, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     If you weren’t there, you missed a great city council meeting in Lindsay last Tuesday.  It’s not exactly what I had in mind when I advocated for public participation, but I guess it’s a start.

 
    Verbal rotten tomatoes were still flying at Mayor Padilla, who is taking most of the heat for the three council members sidelined by Rich Wilkinson’s sleight of hand.  Heck, one person even blamed her for the severance package he wangled out of the city while she was sitting outside that closed session, recused for “conflict of interest” by his charge of conspiracy. Most of the accusations were leveled by Rich’s supporters from the middle class, which just goes to show there’s no accounting for taste. 
 
    I myself chose not to speak, but to sing.  It probably wasn’t the smartest decision I ever made, but I’d had it with speaking.  After the special meeting on June 2, I was so demoralized I considered giving up council meetings altogether and trying something more fun, like picking oranges or writing ad copy.  But then, in my head I heard a line from an Alice Walker poem, and decided to try for the big picture this time.
  
   The big picture, in my mind, is justice.  Will the elected representatives make decisions that benefit the majority of the population and the common good, or will they elect to help their friends and relatives first, assuming some benefit will trickle down to the rest of the community when they prosper?  In my mind, Rich Wilkinson was put in top-gun position to keep the former from happening and to keep the latter in place. 
 
     So, to celebrate the end of that era, I gallantly hauled my autoharp to the podium.  First, I thanked everyone involved in liberating Rich from this community, reminding them that his permanent appointment to city manager/chief of public safety ignited the recall effort of 2011.  I reminded everyone of the evening in 2010 when 800 people came to the city council meeting held in the old high school gymnasium, and how eloquently Sr. Seraphim Rivera remonstrated the old council members for not knowing what it’s like to lay awake nights not knowing how you’re going to pay your water bill.  And then I thanked the three beleagured members for holding the fort, because at least now we have people on the council who understand what that’s like.
 
    Then, in lieu of throwing a street party, I sang the third verse of John Pitney’s song “Walking for Justice,” which goes:  “Each time a woman/ each time a man/ stands up for justice/ and anyone can,/ the heavens are singing/ the whole world rejoices./ Walkers for justice/ lift up your voices./ We’re walking for justice.”
 
    Somehow the big picture got lost.  Forget Rich: the struggle that night was keeping the powers that be in charge of choosing the next city manager.  I’d have done better to bring a Woody Guthrie song like “Do Re Mi.”  You remember that one, right?  “If you ain’t got the do re mi, folks, if you ain’t got the do re mi, … California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see, But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot if you ain’t got the do re mi.”


     See you next time.
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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who is not thinking of going on solo tour – yet.  You can send her your favorite protest songs c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

                                   

 

               

 

 

 

Triple Crown

Published June 10, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

            I didn’t get to see the Belmont Saturday, but I cheered when I heard the winner.  I’ve watched that race on TV many times in my life, hoping to see it won by a horse who’d also taken the Derby and the Preakness.  I’ve always been disappointed, but understandably.  In my girlhood I learned from reading Walter Farley novels that it takes a horse of giant magnitude ridden by a jockey of enormous sensitivity to win on the medium, short and long hauls of racing.  In witnessing this triumph, everyone wins.

            We’ve had a sort of Triple Crown victory in Lindsay this last week.  For everyone who thought it was a bad idea for the community, appointing Rich Wilkinson as interim city manager to the vacancy left by Scot Townsend four and a half years ago, Rich’s sudden, sure departure was a great relief.  For those of us who were jerked into action four years ago by his permanent appointment to that position, compounded by remaining chief of public safety and the outrageous terms of his contract, his severance agreement is small, but real, vindication.

            But the real victory is that the three newest city council members have survived, integrity intact.  They survived despite refusing to give that spoiled baby everything it wanted, despite doing their jobs which, according to him, made his working conditions unendurable. With grace, humor and sheer conviction that the community’s interests were not being served, they held their ground.  Despite being convicted of conspiracy in the media and in the council chambers by those outraged at having the mythic status quo challenged, they held the rail.  On Wednesday, June 3rd, with Rich Wilkinson’s name no longer on the door, their noses crossed the finish line first, with Danny and Pam ‘way back in the pack.

            I didn’t see that finish, either - at first.  I was focused on the form of Rich’s departure, not the content.  I saw the slime-bag strategy, the horrendous self-interest masked as injury, the offense constructed to cover the indefensible defense.  In my eyes, it was ugly.  In my eyes, it was yet another instance of the way it’s always been continuing into the foreseeable future, never changing.  I protested the special meeting where it happened on that basis.  I was defeated in spirit when it was over, bad-spiritedness appearing to win over the public interest once again.

            But Ramona, our beautiful Mayor Padilla, provided a sentence that eventually allowed me to see the bigger picture.  “Sometimes you have to cut off the hand to save the arm,” she told me after the meeting.  At first I didn’t understand who’s hand, who’s arm.  With the apparent effectiveness of Rich’s strategy screaming in my head, I felt amputated.  In my eyes we paid him ‘way too much to be here, to create unholy relations inside city hall and out, and now they were giving him the public’s money to leave, en route to a new home in Missouri and, rumor has it, a new job.  I felt like sending Missouri a sympathy card as well as an apology.

            Ramona saw the value and the necessity of getting this situation changed, value beyond money.  The arm in her metaphor is the community.  With these three council members still in their seats, there is now hope for a real change: representation of this community’s majority, not its small minority.  Witnessing this triumph of democracy, everyone wins.  Everyone.

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Trudy Wischemann is a horse lover who writes.  You can send her your exciting race stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.