Published July 20, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
I
got a call from my favorite Lindsay City Councilman last week, informing me of
his decision to resign. I was sad to
hear it, since now there will be no reliable voice of dissent, no one to really
question the staff’s proposals or to investigate the missing information when
the pieces don’t add up.
But I couldn’t blame him for taking
his name off the roster of those responsible for our city’s future. I finally let myself off that hook, too, the
inactivity of the majority of the Council driving me mad. I don’t miss it, and neither will he. His family will benefit from his reduced
frustration, not to mention the reduced vulnerability. They’ve all paid the price of his involvement
in multiple ways.
But it wasn’t just frustration that
drove both of us away. It was the sense
that our opposition to the conventional way of doing things was exacerbating
the problem, making the staff and other council members more intransigent, not
less. It was the sense that even the
most rational reasons for questioning a proposal, say, or offering another
perspective on a problem would, if it came from our mouths, make the others
flare into an automatically negative response.
It was sense that things got worse instead of better from our
participation.
With no hope of being heard, much
less having one’s position considered and added to the solution, at some point
self-preservation recommends withdrawing from the situation. I found myself there, at least for the time
being, and am glad for the release of my friend from his more strenuous
trial. I still think city hall can be changed
(and that this one should be,) but that would take the emergence of a set of
conditions that have not yet ripened.
First of all, the members of the
public would need to become aware of how the past and current administrations have
sold them down the river. It wouldn’t
take everybody, just a few with sympathy for the range of incomes and cultural
conditions of our residents, and who are also able to communicate with us. It would take one or two people who are
familiar with the ways other communities with our “changing demographics” are
managing the transition from middle-class farm town to a community of people
with much higher mobility and lower material wealth, with greater needs for
acculturation and less native-born skills at citizenship.
Second, it would take someone who could
mobilize those people whose interests are not currently being considered, and
get them talking to the council members before the meetings and then showing up
for a few. It seems to me that the
inactivity of the current Lindsay City Council members is primarily a problem
of being constantly confronted by those people who stand to gain from the city
administration’s plans and projects, while those who stand to be hurt remain
invisible. The people behind last year’s
fraudulent effort to bring the Grand Jury down on the heads of the three
councilmembers who stood up to the administration appeared frequently in the
council meetings, pressing their opinions and reputations, while the people
whose interests the three members were defending stayed home.
When I worked at the market I heard
many complaints from residents of our town.
Always I would encourage them to contact a council member and to attend
a few meetings, but few people ever took me up on the invitation. Personally, I’m not missing the inaction of
my neighbors now, either. When the time
is ripe….
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Trudy
Wischemann is a rural advocate who needs to get some other writing done. You can send your ideas to her c/o P.O. Box
1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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