Last week I confessed the little fling I’m having with girly pink glasses. But most of my life I’ve been associated with a deeper, and more consequential shade of eyewear: rose.
The phrase “rose-colored glasses,”
of course, refers to the lenses, not the frames. It’s a metaphor for a way of seeing the world
in which its darker side is not visible.
People who are accused of looking at the world through rose-colored
glasses are being criticized for not seeing (and not being willing to see,
since glasses are removable,) the tougher, grimmer parts of existence. They only want to see the good, not the bad.
I can remember a time in my life
when I qualified for that criticism. It
was before I left for college, when I still could watch the news on television
and simply not comprehend the civil rights uprisings in LA, Detroit, Chicago
and the entire southeastern U.S. Then I
left home and started trying to make a new one.
Then came the oil embargo of the 1970’s and the tortuous end of the Viet
Nam War. That’s when reality set
in: bad exists, as well as the
possibility that it reigns. Since then,
the question for me has been where and how do you take your stand against that?
I’m sure that people who met me when
I first moved to Lindsay in 1993 thought I had rose-colored glasses strapped
tightly to my face. In response to their
sentiments bemoaning this community’s losses, partly due to the 1990 Freeze but
perhaps even more to Lindsay Olive’s collapse and Sunkist’s decline in market-power over the
prior decade, I would smilingly say “but look at what you still have.”
And I meant it. What I found in Lindsay then was a level of
authenticity and environmental intimacy that I hadn’t known since I moved away from
Puyallup, WA. As our economic shakedown
continued, however, I began to experience losses in the community, too. By the time the City started ripping apart
the park and downtown, I was attached enough to this place to mourn its demise,
even though the replacements promised to resurrect the community’s viability
(which they haven’t.) For years my
metaphorical glasses were dark.
Then came the Lindsay Uprising of
2010, when local residents found their voices and raised them in protest of
exorbitant wages and unfair lending practices at City Hall. They called it corruption, and though the
people never found a way to legally prosecute these nefarious activities, it
started a call for governmental accountability and transparency that still has
teeth.
All we wanted then was a city
government that was responsible to its residents, not to special
interests. I think that’s still what we
need, and what we still can work to achieve.
Call me hopeful, not blind.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a writer who works to be clear-sighted. You can send her your thoughts on lens colors
c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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