Tell the People

     “What shall I tell the people this week?” I asked my sweetheart as he left for work Monday.  “Oh, I don’t know,” he mused as he put his lunch bucket in the front seat.  “Tell them as long as Easter has come again and we have water in the reservoirs, there’s always room for optimism,” he said, buckling his seatbelt before driving off as the sun lighted a bank of clouds above the Sierra. 

           

     “Room for optimism” is a fine topic, especially in this election year like no other.  Since this man came into my life I have observed his many techniques for keeping the way clear for that positive state of mind, despite the fact that he stays informed about what is happening in the world.  Staying uninformed has been one of my ways of coping with the despair that frequently emerges in me when I read or hear the news.  This is only one of the ways in which he’s a good influence on me. 

           

     But “telling the people” is my calling, not his.  Since he came into my life I’ve had a chance to examine this activity otherwise known as “writing,” an act of verbally leaving the comforts of home to go out into our mental streets and call out to others, who may be sitting in their comforts of home, or may be out wandering those same mental streets, distressed at the news.  It is an act of starting an inaudible conversation, or trying to.  It is the hope of sending a thought out into the bewilderness to find another thought to hook up with, to mate or parry, or, sometimes, to trump.

           

     One day last week over breakfast I found myself talking with him about “our people.”  Both of our fathers worked hard for small pay, feeding large families.  That makes us working class by culture even if the collars of our occupations are not now blue, even if our training has taken us a little further away from dangers on the job and the physical wear and tear on our bodies that our fathers experienced.  His people were union Democrats; mine were anti-union Republicans, with some predictable differences in fellowship, epithets and voting.  My family wore “I Like Ike” buttons and waved little flags, while his cursed Eisenhower and prayed for a change in administration we did not get for a decade.  But in other ways our people had, and still have, much in common.

           

     One of the most apparent to me is that we are removed from the land.  Several in my parents’ generation kept trying to stay on or get back to the land, to make farming their livelihood, but failed.  By the mid-1980’s, when I started working with family farmers as an advocate, I calculated that I was fourth generation failed family farmer, not counting some remote cousins in Minnesota still on the land.  As I listened to the farmers talk about who failed and why, and what was needed to keep more farmers from failing and falling into the unfortunate category of working stiffs, I often sensed the insensitivity of this group to the needs of my people. 

           

     Unfortunately it echoed an equal insensitivity I’d experienced on the broad lawns, plazas and classrooms at both UC Berkeley and Davis.  “I have been defending working people since I went back to school,” I told my sweetheart over gluten-free Cheerios, amazed to be counting forty years of this relatively thankless work.

           

     In the media’s bewilderment over Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ surprising popular support, I find a huge blindness to the workings of class.  It isn’t just that these folks are tired of the Establishment:  they’re tired of being invisible.  They’re tired of being denigrated for not having “risen” to some state of enlightenment that makes a three-car garage and a lawn service seem like necessities.  They’re tired of having their lives seen as unimportant.  They’re tired of having their realities unaddressed, of being taken advantage of and made worse by the ignorance of researchers and policy-makers alike.  They’re tired of having to share an ever-smaller pool of resources with an ever-larger number of people, and seeing no hope for change in that scenario.

           

     So, to my people this week I say “look twice.  Why would you trust a skizzilionairre to understand you any better than a Harvard grad?”  And to the rest of you, I say “Let us see if we can’t re-frame our understanding of the social divide these elections represent, and find a way to unite for the real good of the country.”  Because, you see, Easter did come again and there’s water in the reservoirs.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a writer who sees the glass both half-full and half-empty.  You can send her your thoughts on the primaries c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.