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.
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