“The poor will always be with us,” Jesus is said to have said, a statement of fact that has stuck in our communal minds much longer than some of his more important sayings (“Fear not,” for example.) About six months ago I realized that the reason the poor will always be with us is because the greedy, despotic rich will always be with us, snagging the poor’s share of the earth’s resources for themselves in an unholy accumulation.
There’s no getting rid of them, the greedy, despotic rich. Remove the one at the top and a new one will rise to the surface, always. It’s in our human nature, unfortunately. We create the poor with our hungers, keep them hungry with our satisfied wants. No way around it, folks: the poor will always be with us.
The same can be said of black
sheep: we make them. In epochs where tolerance holds little sway,
we make more of them from better material, but always we make them. We do it to maintain a sense of law and
order, a necessity of the social contract.
When selfish actions threaten the community as a whole, we shove the
actors to the margins, call them a few names (like “black sheep,”) marking them
for further punishment down the line. The rest of the sheep, mostly white, keep
to their nibbling close to the fold.
But when the social contract becomes contorted to give perks to a few at the cost of the many, the black sheep we make become that contract’s biggest threat. Dissent becomes the biggest offense, punishable by (im)moral law. Speaking your mind can get you excoriated, even excommunicated. Look at Ted Cruz: he’s a black sheep now for sure.
Speaking your mind is difficult almost any time, but especially when it differs from the powers that be. It only becomes dangerous, however, when those powers are vulnerable and what you’re saying threatens to cause them some loss.
This is the case of former Lindsay
City Councilman Steven Mecum. Last
week’s front-page article on his resignation in this paper built a one-sided
case for his black-sheepness, using opinions from people whose ideas he’d
opposed. It cited the lawsuit he filed
and won against the City before being elected to the council as if it was a
liability rather than the stroke for government accountability and transparency
that it was. It hypothesized that his
frequent absences were his reason for quitting without counting the absences of
the other councilmembers who stayed; it failed to consider that a council member
could have a perfect attendance record without accomplishing a thing.
The last third of the article missed
the boat entirely. After correctly
identifying Mecum’s goal of “reigning in administrative power at City Hall,” it
nailed that effort to the cross of Rich Wilkinson’s resignation and the
subsequent effort by the administration’s supporters to get the Tulare Grand
Jury to investigate (and hopefully remove) three of the five sitting council
members including Mecum. I called that
effort “fraudulent” in last week’s column; “nefarious” and “vendetta” would
also apply, as would “shameful.”
This is what happens in epochs when
tolerance does not hold sway, where social contracts have become contorted to
serve only a few, and where that contortion makes those served incredibly
vulnerable to the simple act of dissent.
We make black sheep out of our best material, and then cower, waiting
for the other shoe to drop.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Trudy Wischemann is a fearful person who frequently dissents anyway. You can send her your dissenting views c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
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