Going to the Polls

Published June 8, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Did you make it?  Did you go to the polls to vote?  I wish I’d been there to join you if you did, but that privilege has been taken away from me by the County.  Now I have to vote by mail, as many of you do.  For some people, this is a privilege they choose over taking time from Tuesday.  I miss going to the polls, however.

     Rita Woodard, our Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector/Registrar of Voters since 2007, says she’s only responding to State law when her office determines who votes by mail.  I’ll accept that.  During the 2012 election, the first one I discovered that I’d been relegated to this category (as did hundreds of other Lindsay voters, with much chaos ensuing,) she informed me that voting by mail increases voter turnout.  I think it’s possible that voluntary vote-by-mail balloting does increase voter turnout.  I think it’s also possible that the involuntary sort might actually be responsible for some of these low voter turnout numbers the media has been flashing in our faces this year.

     Did you notice when yours came in the mail last month?  Did you fill it out right away and send it in?  Or did you want to wait until you’d heard the last-minute appeals from candidates to make up your mind?  Because if you decided to wait and take your ballot to the polls (like it says you can in the instructions,) your ballot will not be counted until after the regular ballots are all tallied, weeks after the results have been announced.

     Did you sign it in the right spot on the envelope?  Did you use the same signature that you have on file at the Registrar of Voters office?  Have you checked the website to see whether or not your ballot was counted?  I hope that my signature still resembles the one I filed in 1993,but I haven’t yet checked to see whether the person who examined my envelope thought it does.  All of which is to say that I voted, but don’t yet know whether it counted or not.

     So let me just state outright that I think there’s a lot more room for uncertainty in this shift from going to the polls to voting by mail, and it makes me uncomfortable.  That’s one reason that I miss going to the polls.

     The other reason is the loss of sense of my membership in community, both locally and countrywide.  There’s just something about standing in line with my neighbors that dignifies the act of voting and solidifies my sense of residence here.  There’s something about standing at the little portable booths they set up in the Veterans Memorial Building that reminds me it’s a solemn duty of citizenship in the United States of America and that I have that important right.  That sense of participation is honored when I pass by the names on the building’s entrance of people who have died in multiple wars defending that right. At least I voted.

     And I voted early for a change, not wanting to risk my chance to be counted.  After dropping my ballot in the mail, I attended rallies for the two Democratic candidates for President, and might have changed my mind if it weren’t too late to do so.  That’s the third reason I miss going to the polls.

     Reform of the voting system is heavy on the hearts and minds of our national leaders at the moment.  I hope that won’t include not going to the polls.  I wish there were some way to address my concerns at the local level, however.  Anybody else miss going to the polls?

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Trudy Wischemann is an agrarian advocate who writes.  Thanks to Bob Welch in Exeter for his comments this week. You can send your nostalgic voting memories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

           

Eulogy Values

Published June 1, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times and a conservative commentator on PBS’s News Hour on Friday nights, gave a wonderful presentation in Fresno on May 10^th.  He was promoting his new book called “The Road to Character” which identifies two different value systems.  One he calls “resume” values (i.e., values that define professional success in this society,) and the other, “eulogy” values:  the things people say about you after you are dead and define you as a good person.

           

     “The argument in the book,” he told Fresno Bee reporter Tim Sheehan, “is that we spend a lot of time, especially in our educational system, on (developing) the resume virtues and not enough time on the eulogy (virtues) – are you a good person? – even though we know those are more important.”  He believes that “We’ve become a country that’s just really pleased with itself,” having become “a more narcissistic culture,” “over-politicized and under-moralized,” over the past half century.

           

     With the current level of political debate at the national level, it’s just a darned good time to be thinking about these distinctions.  The gap between these two values systems is where we find ourselves caught in this country.  When Donald Trump confided at the microphone that he was kinda hoping for the housing mortgage bubble to burst ‘way back in 2008, and then defended  himself when Democrats seized on that little revelation with “Hey, what am I supposed to do? I’m a businessman!” – he was trying to straddle that gap.  The fact that he normally stands with both feet on the businessman side apparently is still lost on his supporters.

           

     Or not. There are those who still believe that whatever is good for business is good for the country, that whatever trickles down is better than nothing, I guess.

           

     I believe in trickle up, which is always harder to defend, especially when resume values hold sway or are touted as the only ones that matter.  If we didn’t have to keep writing eulogies, we might forget the other system entirely.  But thankfully we do.  

           

     David Brooks may have been caught in that values gap recently when he wrote a story for the New York Times (republished May 19^th in the Bee) on the philanthropic contributions to the small Westside community of Lost Hills by land and water tycoons Lynda and Stewart Resnick of Paramount fame.  The Resnicks, both noticeably aging in the 2013 photo of them attending a community forum in that town, may be developing their own set of eulogy values for their bucket list.  (It should be noted that what they’re giving is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak: an infinitesimal percentage of their net worth.)  Brooks’ literary portrait of those contributions was sweet.  I hope it encourages the Resnicks to double or even triple their efforts.  

           

     But there is no way to offset the damage done to Lost Hills and myriad other Central Valley towns by the structure of political power and economic control created when one entity owns too much land.  You cannot offset the jobs lost in packinghouses from the plant closures and mechanization by Paramount (oops, sorry: Wonderful, Inc.)  You cannot offset the farming opportunities lost in citrus or nuts like pistachios and almonds; you can’t bring back the small pomegranate farmers they decimated several years ago when they thawed the frozen juice they’d been hoarding.  You can’t bring back the downtowns they destroyed when they sold off those communities’ water to southern California or pumped down the aquifers.  No amount of financial aid can offset the socio-political and economic damages inflicted by giant landholdings on communities. 

           

     The Resnics do not now, and probably never will wear Haloes, no matter how many dollars they drop on Lost Hills or how many other communities they attempt to rescue.  Like Donald Trump, they have one foot on each side of the resume/eulogy values gap, and when push comes to shove or some opportunity raises its snaky head, we’ll find them with both feet on the resume values side, not even blinking.

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Trudy Wischemann is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.  Thanks to Michele Hester and Mark Arax for their comments this week.  You can send your thoughts on rural philanthropy c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

The Incontinent Divide

Published May 25, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     In Saturday’s Fresno Bee, Andrew Fiala, Director of the Ethics Center at Fresno State, wrote a whole-hearted column defending the place of enlightenment in our nation’s constitution and educational system.  Although I have worked hard to become a reputable and responsible product of that system, his column left me feeling torn, like someone standing with the Great Continental Divide running between each foot.  

           

     I admire and like Dr. Fiala:  he came to speak at Lindsay’s Cultural Arts Center last fall about the cultural roots of violence, and his research appeared to me to be useful and important.  In writing a regular column for the Bee, Fiala is spreading that usefulness beyond the university’s bounds, much like what I try to do with my column in this paper.  I see him as an ally. 

           

     But Saturday’s piece traced a fault line that runs through this country’s mentality between the so-called enlightened and the so-called unenlightened, a strike-slip fault like the San Andreas where each side inexorably moves in the opposite direction of the other, tearing up the zone between them.  In defining and defending “enlightenment,” Fiala was trying to describe the sometimes invisible place of liberal values in this otherwise conservative region.  But knowledge, that hoped-for product of enlightenment thinking, does not always lead down a liberal path, or even a progressive one.

           

     Over the last 100 years some of the world’s greatest political tyrants have been highly educated (Cambodia’s Pol Pot, for example.)  Universities have produced some of the hardest-line conservatives the world has known, and not just in the area of national defense.  Decades of promulgation of the Green Revolution and the structure of agribusiness around the world have destroyed native cultures and ecologies whose knowledge bases and ways of living were sustainable.  They were replaced by what is not sustainable at great cost to people, places and the future of the world.  The hope I once had for enlightenment thinking has been replaced by a giant suspicion of academics not unlike that of the Trump followers.

           

    “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day,” Fiala quoted Thomas Jefferson.  I love to quote Jefferson and often do, despite being chastised by the politically-correct foes of racism who apparently remind Fiala as well as myself of Jefferson’s ownership of slaves.  But enlightenment of people does not eliminate the source of tyranny and oppression, which as often comes from someone who considers himself (or herself) more enlightened than the people referred to above.  It might prepare them better to resist or eventually conquer tyrants and oppressors, but it certainly does not erase those evil spirits from our days.

           

     Four decades ago, when I was a 26-year-old student new to UC Berkeley (notably a land grant college,) I was escorted by an elderly, retired economics professor to the north side of the campus to read the inscription on the ag building, Hilgard Hall.  His name was Paul Taylor, and he’d devoted his life and his career to defending both the family farm and the rights of farm laborers, protecting the acreage limitation and residency provisions of federal reclamation law until they were decimated by enlightenment thinking and politics in 1992.  

           

     The inscription reads “To rescue for human society the native values of rural life,” a sentiment which bridges the leaking divide between two ways of knowing.  It is academic acknowledgement of the value of those who might not be seen as ‘enlightened.”  It is an intention, a statement of purpose and responsibility, not just a declaration of virtue.  

           

     It also expresses understanding of a potential danger – that human society might become torn from its sustaining roots – as well as indicating the tonic needed.  Forty years after reading the inscription, I still think it shows the way to become continent again.

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Trudy Wischemann is an agrarian advocate who is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.  Thanks to Jim Likins and Ronald Abee for their comments this week.  You can send your stories of rural life c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.