Just Fear

Published March 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “It’s just fear,” I said to my friend Pam on the phone the other day.  We were talking about relationships, the great subject of womankind, and I was mentioning a discovery I’d made for about the ten-thousandth time.

           

     “Trudy,” she said, having known me for more than 40 years, “do you think you could leave off the word ‘just’?”

           

     My mental eyes opened as she stripped away my protective covering.  Minimizing fear is one of the ways we try to deal with the most natural, protective instinct we were born with.  By treating my fear as if it is a gnat-sized annoyance, I’m making myself a gladiator, big enough to spit in its face and walk away.  Dealing with what caused the fear is a different, and actually more productive, response.

           

     I think fear is at the root of the deep divide that is said to be plaguing the country.  If I were to give that fear a name, it is that people are afraid of being left behind economically because of the group they belong to, shut out from participating in America’s bounty because of some categorization scheme.  For many this fear is not “just,” but justified.  Many people have to overcome not just fear, but also handicaps placed on them by others in order to receive rewards for their efforts.

           

     And it seems to me that the people placing those handicaps on others are being driven by fear.  Is it also justified?  Might be worth asking that question.

           

     Fear makes jihadists out of rebels, revolutionaries out of social discontents.  It makes nations go to war.  It makes men (and women) buy guns to protect their households and their persons even though the statistics on gun accidents show that people harm themselves more often than trespassers.  It makes people stop loving each other even when the reasons for loving still exist.

           

     “Fear not,” were the first words I really comprehended in the Bible when I returned to the church in search of faith.  The Quaker mystic Rufus M. Jones understood fear’s universal role in conflict, as well as the antidote to fear that Christianity offers.  He wrote this passage sometime during the prelude to World War II:

           

     “Christ’s major point throughout the Sermon on the Mount is to get rid of fears and anxieties.  It might almost be said that the substance of his mission as a teacher was to set us free from the slavery of fears.  ‘Why are ye so fearful?’ he keeps saying.  Stop your unnecessary worries.  Cut out your excessive anxieties.  It has been well said that the most ruinously expensive of all our emotions is fear.  It is that very emotion of fear that has thrown our world out of joint and brought us to this unspeakable calamity. . . .”

           

     Many of the fears being expressed by people on my side of the political divide are that the fears being generated and/or fanned to flames on the other side will push us toward more ‘unspeakable calamities’ like those we’ve witnessed before:  genocides like the Jews’ and Armenians’, wars like Viet Nam, El Salvador and Afghanistan.  Extinctions like the passenger pigeon, soon to be replicated in the Arctic, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Pacific Flyway.  In this new realm of “alternative facts,” there are fears for justice itself moving to the endangered species list.

           

     Pam’s right.  It’s time to leave off the word “just” and learn to deal with our fear another way than minimizing it.  It’s time to face the music, so to speak:  the music of democracy is equality among, not advantage over, others.  Let’s dance.

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Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte Friend who writes.  You can send her your stories of defeating fear c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Carolyn Davenport for her loving and helpful feedback.

When One Cries

Published March 8, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


      One night last week while washing dishes, out of the corner of my ear I heard a man on public TV say “When one cries, we all cry.”  He was part Cherokee and he was discussing a problem of tribal membership blocked for those who also were part Negro.  Although some members of the tribe disagreed, to this man one drop of Cherokee blood was not negated by one drop of Black blood.  For him, one drop of Cherokee blood is enough to qualify anyone for membership in the tribe of Us.

           

     “When one cries, we all cry.”  When I heard those words, I wanted to cry myself.  I admired, even envied the understanding of community that says to its individuals “You are not alone, no matter what.”  Then later that week, in the PBS program on African history, I learned that Africa is the cradle not just of civilization but of humanity itself.  The first human beings evolved in Africa and then migrated to other parts of the globe, sometimes in response to drastic climate change and war.  What anthropologists, the scientists of humanity, now believe is that all of us have a drop of Black blood in us.  So, when one of us cries.…

           

     Community was called on this week in Lindsay.  At Tuesday night’s city council meeting, the minister from New Life Church, Pastor Roger Wright, asked the council to consider hosting some kind of seminar that would clarify the city’s role in managing the immigration questions before the country right now.  “In my small congregation of about 80 people I have four families who are undocumented.  These are really good people,” he said, then repeated “really good people.”  He let the meaning and the truth of that evaluation sink in.

           

     His appeal was not political, but a call to compassion because “There’s a lot of fear out there.”  Noting that some of the fear has been triggered by misinformation, he felt that fear could be relieved by something that would educate the people about their real standing in the community.  It’s relief that only our city’s government can provide.

           

     Pastor Wright’s plea was seconded by an organizer for Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights, who noted that people all over our region are frightened.  He said that those who have no criminal record need to know that they can call the police if they are victims of crime without being deported themselves.  He was followed by a Lindsay resident who summed it up this way:   “They (the undocumented) need to know that Lindsay will protect its own.”  What all three men were saying is that these people need to know they are ours, that when one of them cries…

           

     Then, at the Wednesday evening Cultural Arts Forum, the audience heard about homeless people in Tulare County and within the Lindsay Unified School District.  Jason Britt and Angel Galvez from Tulare County Health and Human Services were joined by Linda Ledesma from Lindsay’s Healthy Start Family Resource Center.  Together they painted a portrait of our homeless population in terms of numbers, causes, and possible solutions, giving the problem a set of human faces I could recognize in my mind.  However, when one of the speakers mentioned that there are no shelters in Lindsay for homeless people, a voice rose from the audience asking “why?”

           

     Mr. Britt explained that most shelters are developed and maintained by non-profit organizations, including church groups, and that the county does not provide this service.  But when the woman repeated her question “Why are there no shelters in Lindsay?” he simply said “I don’t know.”  Then she said “I’m homeless,” and stood up to address the audience herself.

           

     She spoke about where she sleeps each night, how she maintains herself, where her money comes from.  She told us why most shelters are not an option for her because she has two small dogs who form her entire family, and most shelters don’t admit people with pets.  She turned what had been an incredibly informing presentation into an incredibly moving experience, her personal story reinforcing what we’d heard from the experts.

           

     The truth is, this brave woman made it easier to see that the people who bear the nametag “homeless” are also ours.  The potential solutions to homelessness, as well as those of undocumented immigrants, are many and will take multiple initiatives.  But perhaps where we start is with this basic principle of community:  when one cries, we all cry.

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Trudy Wischemann is a native of the Pacific Northwest who migrated south to Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts on rights to a roof and land c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Scar Tissue

Published March 1, 2017 in slightly edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s March.  Black History Month has come to an end, leaving us with eleven months to lay down more white history, skid marks and all, before we’re reminded once again of our propensity for hubris and brutality.  If the institution of slavery is dead (i.e., “it’s history,”) I’m afraid the economic values still thrive that once allowed us to think it’s OK to own other people or determine their future.

           

     This month, the Dakota Access Pipeline will be completed without apology to the future or to the Standing Rock Sioux, who had the juevos to claim their culture’s deeper ecological understanding and their children’s rights to clean drinking water.  This month, the site of their protest (on land once theirs) will be drowned by the waters of a reservoir stored for urban users downstream, another environmental manipulation with white fingerprints on it.  It’s hard for me to believe we can still be so blind to these crimes, but there it is.

     “Get out of my country,” a deranged man yelled in a bar on the Kansas side of Kansas City last week before shooting three men, two from India, killing one.  Officials did not immediately label this act a hate crime, perhaps because the shooter’s state of derangement was already known.  Age 51, he’s lived with his father his whole life until his father died a year ago, devastating him; clearly he's someone who has not been able to make his own way in this world.  Those two young men from halfway around the globe were not responsible for his lack of place or standing, for his inability to function in this society, but they took the hit for it.

     “I want my country back,” my mother used to say when the last George Bush was in office.  Her sense of dispossession came from a political hierarchy she didn’t believe in generating policies touted as American that she couldn’t abide.  She had a white face to blame for her sense of loss, not black, brown or yellow, but little more recourse than the man from Kansas City.  Having an eight year reprieve helped, but now she just leaves the television off.

           

     “The country’s deeply divided,” we hear over and over in the news without having the fault line mapped that separates us.  Week Four of the new administration in Washington ended with President Trump claiming he’s on track with what he wanted to accomplish.  If keeping the country deeply divided was on that list, he’s right.  But I think what divides us goes deeper than his hubris, and deeper than our mental constructs of race, ethnicity, even class.  I think it comes from land, the source of all wealth:  from who has access to it and who doesn’t.

     Near the beginning of his writing career, Wendell Berry wrote a book about slavery called The Hidden Wound.  It’s really a long personal essay about the black people who were part of his Kentucky tobacco farming family, including some held as slaves, and the cost to whites of the divided consciousness inflicted by that system.  But when I read the book, I came to realize that racism is the excuse our minds create to explain why I (the so-called superior person) should have land and you (the so-called inferior one,) shouldn’t.  And if I, a white person, have become dispossessed of land and/or the wealth derived from it, woe unto you less-than-white people who still have a yard to call your own.

           

     I think we don’t know the divide.  Is it race, or ethnicity, or economic class and education – or is it something else that keeps separating us into artificial categories which keep us fighting over straws?  I think it’s Berry’s hidden wound and our ignorance of land’s critical role in slashing our consciences.  The wound’s scabs have been torn off so often the flesh has not healed normally, but become scar tissue, proudflesh.  I think our future is limited to making more scar tissue until we address what made the initial cut.

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Trudy Wischemann almost has finished editing a book of writings on land and water in California.  Anyone interested in this topic can contact her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message below.