Liberty & Justice

Published June 28, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Familiar words, “liberty and justice.”  Three of the last five words of the Pledge of Allegiance, spoken as we salute our flag, they ring true as national standards.  They are words worth fighting for, and fighting over.           

    

     As we move into the Fourth of July, we might think about these three words.  With red, white and blue flags billowing, fireworks replicating “bombs bursting in air,” and beer flowing like blood on the battlefields where our liberty, if not justice, was won, surely we can take a few minutes to ponder the reason for celebrating.

           

     Of these three words, I think we like “liberty” best.  It’s the one we defend most often when we send our boys (and now girls) off to war, their liberties seriously reduced the moment they don uniforms, where “liberty” means getting the weekend off.

    
     "Justice” is the word we have to fight to defend at home most of the time.  I think the question of justice is really what divides us as a country right now.  Injustices to people on both sides, long unaddressed, are what fuel the fires of dissension – and the belief that those on the other side have no interest in healing the wounds.  The concept of justice underlies our current health care battles, which seem to me like writhing snakes fighting to their deaths.

     But really, the most interesting word of the three is the conjunction “and.”  It’s not “or.” It’s not ambiguous.  “Liberty” and “justice” are conjoined; they belong together.  We can’t choose between them:  we need both.  One without the other is less than half; the promise of America is lost without holding the two together, no matter how difficult that holding may be.

  

     I’ve come to that understanding from the Quaker concept of truth and love.  Quakers believe that you have to hold those two things, “truth” and “love”, together or the promise of the faith is compromised. As one Friend, Muriel Bishop, has written “Truth without love is violence. And love without truth is sentimentality.  We do need both.”

           

     Freedom without justice means that some people are not free.  I can’t even imagine what justice without freedom might be, perhaps because I was born into a free country, luckier than most of the world’s population.  Most of us would defend to the death each person’s right to become a millionaire, but we balk when it comes to challenging some inordinately wealthy people on their unfair business practices or their abuses of labor.  We take that lying down, until the trampling mortifies our consciences.  Then the struggle begins.    

     Independence is worth celebrating, but liberty and justice take work.  On this 241^st birthday of our nation, let’s commit to making it a better year ahead.

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Trudy Wischemann is a verbal freedom fighter who writes from her home in Lindsay.  You can send her your justice war stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Beyond Dreaming

Published in abbreviated form June 21, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This morning I woke with a dream that was more like a backward vision.  I was in the old Lindsay Gazette office on Honolulu St. awaiting the bad news (for me) from Reggie Ellis (who was still the editor) that I was being laid off, even though in the dream (as in real life) I was not an employee.  The paper simply no longer could afford to give me these column inches, he said, because “no one reads anymore.”  The paper’s fate was looking grim.

           

     I know the dream was in the past not only because the Gazette had not yet merged with the Exeter Sun, but because the town still had two hardware stores.  I had just written about one of them, a beautiful piece (I thought) about how the community gathered not only its goods there, but also a sense of well-being and purpose, as well as a portion of its local news (sometimes known as gossip.)  A good hardware store is even better than the grocery for reinforcing our domestic claim to this place and each other, since there we tend our homes and not just our stomachs.  Pipe fittings and curtain rods, nails, nuts and bolts; seedlings in spring, lawn rakes and leaf bags in fall; tools for the garden and garage, picture hangars and furnace filters, flags to fly on the Fourth of July – a good hardware store is really the hub of town.           

     Lindsay had two hardware stores when I moved here in 1993.  Then Western Auto closed, followed a couple of years later by Race and Landers’ True Value.  For several years we had no hardware store at all, until Art Serna re-opened the True Value across the street from the Race and Landers building, which remains empty to this day.  In my dream this reality was just a trajectory, the future foreseen but yet to be fulfilled.

           

     For someone in my research area, small towns are like canaries in the mine.  When they start to die off, it’s a sign that something toxic is in the air, figuratively speaking.  It’s easy to blame our small towns’ disintegration on the growth of Visalia, Tulare and Porterville, with their medical facilities, big-box stores and other worldly attractions.  But what’s really crumbling is the ground beneath our feet:  the smaller, resident, owner-operated farm system built by the agricultural cooperatives of Sunkist and Lindsay Olive, sustained locally by the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District distributing the waters from the federal Friant-Kern Canal.

           

     Remnants of that system remain, but giant chunks have been replaced by urban investors and the fruits of industrial agriculture.  This does not bode well for the town, much less the remaining hardware store - or the newspaper, for that matter.  Yet these towns we live in – Lindsay, Exeter, Farmersville, Woodlake, even unincorporated Ivanhoe and Strathmore – are critical to the well-being of our region and nation.  They are the incubators of citizenship and the seedbeds of our humanity.

           

     There is much we can do to conserve this social resource.  We can protect the remnants, and use them to generate the new, sustainable agricultural system we need.  We can learn from them how to build churches and civic organizations, support the schools, and generate new businesses with the wisdom from their experience.  We can “buy local” and grow our own rather than put our money where the ravenous corporate mouth is.  We can rebuild sustainable towns by rebuilding sustainable farms that raise families who know where food comes from and communities connected to their source of livelihood.

           

     “Impossible,” you say? Not according to my Methodist songwriter-friend John Pitney, who has spent his entire ministry singing and preaching that reality back to life in rural places across the country.  John’s work has brought to life the theology of land in the Judeo-Christian tradition in places like Idaho, the Great Plains, Washington and Oregon.  He even planted a mustard seed of hope here in Fresno in 1992.   It’s not impossible, John says, because we’re being called to that work by our Creator.  In the last verse of one of his songs, “If You Want Your Neighbor’s Land,” he writes:

 

 “Now it may be beyond our dreaming

when we see the land divided

and re-familied by the neighbors

who can keep the world from fear. 

 

But you should know it’s not our cleverness

that keeps the land reforming,

but that Wisdom beyond dreaming

that returns our children here.”

 

           

     And all the people say “Amen.”

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Trudy Wischemann is a once-nomadic researcher who came home to write. You can send her your land & kitchen reform ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

The Not-O.K. Corral

Published in edited form June 14, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I grew up hearing the phrase “Meanwhile, back at the O.K. Corral, ...”  It meant that the real stuff was happening just around the corner while we were looking somewhere else.  That phrase returned to me last week when I learned about the passage of Lindsay’s Measure O.

           

     The O.K. Corral was a livery stable in Tombstone, Arizona where the most famous shootout in the Wild West occurred in 1881.  Wikipedia says it lasted 30 seconds, used 30 bullets, killed 3 out of 5 bad guys and wounded 3 out of 4 good guys.  U.S. Marshall Wyatt Earp was the good guy who walked away unscathed.

           

     It was an era when outlaws outnumbered lawmen in the western part of the U.S.   This time, however, the lawmen won, forecasting the future.  The West would eventually be safe for settling in towns, homes, farms and ranches.

           

     It’s hard to see the connection between that event and the City of Lindsay’s victory at the ballot box.  But there are some similarities, primarily that “the good guys” appear to have won, saving Lindsay from pending financial disaster.  At least, that’s the hope.

           

     Although I voted against it privately, I didn’t oppose Measure O publicly for several reasons.  First, I don’t know that it won’t help.  I have my doubts that it will help and fears that it will hurt, but I don’t know.  Second, I was chicken.  With all the perfect Vote Yes signs on the lawns of upstanding people in the community, a hand-painted Vote No sign on my lawn would have been politically incorrect.  Third, at least we had the opportunity to vote for or against this tax increase (thanks to state law,) unlike the property tax increases we experienced due to Townsend’s projects, which we had no say in whatsoever.

           

     But the fourth reason was political.  The current City administration thinks this column causes a lot of their problems.  I wanted to see if they are right.

           

    Looking at the results, it’s hard to call this a victory for democracy.  Of an estimated 8,000 voting-age residents, Lindsay has 2,789 registered voters.  As of June 12, only 561 people had cast ballots:  380 for, 181 against.  Less than 14% of Lindsay’s registered voters (and less than half of one percent of the voting age residents) raised our sales tax to the highest rate in the county.  Six percent of registered voters resisted that increase, without any campaign, any lawn signs or bumper stickers, or any prompting from this column.  A handful of people decided the future of Lindsay’s retail merchants serving 12,000 city residents and thousands more residing outside the city limits.  That’s not a victory for the town even if it is for the City.

           

     Things aren’t O.K. down at the corral.  Two weeks ago in this paper, editor Paul Myer advised vigilance on the part of community members to ensure that the hoped-for additional revenues will be spent as projected.  Unfortunately, thanks to this city’s uncivic practices, citizen participation is marginal at best.   I think we might need some new good guys to ride into town and give us a hand.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher who writes. You can send her your thoughts about our 8.5 % sales tax c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Joy and Wonder

Written for Memorial Day, 2017


     Saturday morning, as we entered the Memorial Day weekend, a passage from a book of Quaker wisdom caught my eye.  It was about joy and wonder, and it helped me prepare for the ceremonies ahead.

           

     Memorial Day is not my favorite holiday.  Like so many others, its conversion to a celebration of American consumption patterns, away from its true purpose, irks me.  But its true purpose is also a challenge. I have yet to learn to honor my war dead, which includes the brother born 17 months behind me, the curly redhead second child, the first son.  The twenty-one years he spent on this planet made my life both complicated and complete.  His departure ended all grievances I might have held against him, but, more than I knew at the time, it left me alone.

           

     His death was the result of some poor choices he made, including getting his girlfriend pregnant.  But the daughter that was born to him and the girlfriend who’d become his wife, made him a proud father for more than a year.  The sight of that baby tucked into his arm like a prize is one I’ll never forget.           

    

     His death in Viet Nam was like a hand grenade thrown into the family’s center.  I had already left for college and marriage, starting my adult life.  He’d left for basic training and the opportunity to fly in helicopters. We two older ones left behind a younger brother, sister, and two parents whose marriage was wearing thin.  Less than two years after he died that household had split in two, the younger kids dangling separately from the edges.  You might think the passage of 45 years would erase or soften that memory, but it has not.

           

     Despite his premature death, my brother is the only one of us to carry the family into the future.  That baby, my niece, has gone on to make two babies of her own; her firstborn daughter has made my niece a grandmother twice.  It’s a story many families have, but it’s one I’ve somehow ignored until recently when my niece began actively introducing her beautiful family into the ragged remnants of her father’s tribe.

           
     It was my amazing niece who came to mind when I read this passage from Plain Living:  A Quaker Path to Simplicity (2001), a book I still read daily: 

     “Something seen, something heard, something felt, flashes upon one with a bright freshness, and the heart, tired or sick or sad or merely indifferent, stirs and lifts in answer.  Different things do it for different people, but the result is the same:  that fleeting instant when we lose ourselves in joy and wonder.  It is minor because it is slight and so soon gone; it is an ecstasy because there is an impersonal quality in the vivid thrust of happiness we feel, and because the stir lingers in the memory.”  Elizabeth Gray Vining, 1942

           

     Joy and wonder.  I had that those fleeting instants while watching my niece weave the two halves of her family together.  I saw that her way of being in the world, which is so like my brother’s and yet is her own, is the one intimate experience I have of the eternal, and of grace.

    

     I offer this story in case anyone else suffers on Memorial Day.  Press on.

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Trudy Wischemann is a not-so-gifted writer who has much to be grateful for.  You can send your Memorial Day thoughts to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.  Thanks to Joe Mohnike for his war stories this week, and for coming back alive.