Vietnam

Published in edited form Sept. 27, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
    
     Some of the news this weekend focused on the word “divisive,” referring to Donald Trump’s leadership style.   It ranged from high-profile TV sports to kitchen tables around the country.  On one hand we had the NFL’s rebuttal to Trump’s criticism of their leadership regarding kneeling during the national anthem, which split sports fans rooting for the same team into armed camps.  On another, we heard about the study session Oprah conducted in Michigan for 60 Minutes.  Participants were asked about the influences of Trump's leadership, and they answered with stories of dividedness across regions, classes and occupations, down to the family level.  Many expressed fears that this dividedness could lead to civil war.
    
     I had intended to explore the word “divisive” for this week’s edition until I watched the sixth episode of Ken Burns’ Vietnam series Sunday night.  Although I know our country is divided now, the series is reminding me of the deep divisions we experienced then - and lived through.  That is what I want to explore with you now.    

    
     The Vietnam series is chronicling the U.S. involvement in another country’s war.  I was a child when our involvement started and a teenager when it escalated to full-fledged commitment of troops and materiel. The sixth episode took us through Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968, the month of my high school graduation.  At that point, like so many people interviewed in the series, I believed the government’s version of the Vietnam story.  At that point I did not believe our government would lie to us.   

    
     Then I went away to college, to the quiet campus of Willamette University in Oregon’s capitol, Salem, where I’d received the best financial aid package.  Most of the students were from conservative, middle-class families who wanted their children safe, and campus activities reflected that desire.  But the outrage unfolding on other campuses around the country wafted through, and by the time I went home for my second (and last) summer, the sorrow of the Kent State student killings in Ohio had become outrage in me.  Not only had our government lied about the deaths and waste of Vietnam, they’d lied about the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution.  Protesting could get you killed in the U.S. as easily as in the U.S.S.R.   

    
     My outrage extended to my family’s conservative, WWII values system, and drove me from them more completely than any fight over the 2016 election would have.  I did not notice (nor was I told) when my brother, the curly-headed second child, signed up in early 1971.  Late 1972, when he came home in a body bag we could not unzip, sorrow and outrage merged with guilt and pain to form a canyon I barely recognized.  As a family, we never really recovered.     


     But the country did, eventually, though I wouldn't say it healed.  What the Vietnam series is providing now is an understanding of the issues that both led us there and kept us from addressing the root causes at the time.  With that understanding - and a modicum of forgiveness and humility - I feel that healing might be occurring as we watch.    

    
     Our current president’s management style, learned from the competitive world of business, is divide and conquer.  It was defined by Machiavelli, and employed by despots like Julius Caesar and Napoleon.  According to Wikipedia, Immanuel Kant wrote that “divide and conquer” is the third of three political maxims, the others being “act now, make excuses later,” and “when you commit a crime, deny it.”  The power of divisiveness as a political strategy has been proven over and over, to the woe of peoples around the world.   

    
     But what the dividedness of the Vietnam era shows us is the necessity of respecting its source.  When an issue divides us, a real issue and not just a rude comment stemming from an inexcusable attitude, and we recognize the validity of complaints on all sides, then we have a prayer of coming together in true unity.    

    
     The issues that divide us now are real.  We need leaders who help us find ways to address them, not shame those who stand (or kneel) in protest of the status quo.

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Trudy Wischemann is a Gold-Star Sister who writes.  You can send her your protests c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Bricks & Mortar

Published Jan. 10, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     In a bad dream last week, I saw myself moving to some border community to find a job hauling buckets of mortar for the wall our presumptive president-elect wants to build.  I’m not sure where the mortar bucket idea came from, but it seems to have been one of those cross-fertilization things.    

     On Jan. 7^th The Fresno Bee carried an article announcing the estimated costs for the 2,000 mile fixture - $6.5 million PER MILE for a single-layer fence, with $4.2 million more for additional layers and roads, construction only, not including maintenance.   Adding 6.5 with 4.2, then multiplying $10.7 million times 1,300 miles (2,000 minus 700 equals the length of border we do NOT already HAVE fencing) and having only slight trouble keeping track of my decimal points and zeroes, I was stunned.  The thought that we’d spend that much on bricks and mortar (oops - steel-reinforced concrete) that has about 0.0015% chance of doing what it’s supposed to do was mindboggling.  Mexican peasants, quoted in a Bee article earlier that week, say it won’t keep them away from a chance to work and help their families.  A total waste of materials and money, if you ask me.

     Then I remembered where I’d heard the word “mortar.”  It was at the special meeting of the Lindsay City Council, which was convened to discuss their goals and objectives for the coming year.          
    
     The meeting was pleasant and productive, a chance for the new finance director and the newly-appointed councilmembers to come up to speed with the old ones.  CM Bill Zigler conducted the meeting with his usual panache, and it was during a discussion about the goal of retaining a friendly, small-town atmosphere, particularly downtown, while growing in economic diversity and “rebranding” the city’s image that I heard the term “brick and mortar.”
           
     I thought it was planning slang, but it’s actually a result of the e-world.  According to Wikipedia, “brick and mortar” businesses are those with a physical presence:  an address on a physical street, not the Web, where customers go to shop with their feet, not just let their fingers do the walking.  “Brick and mortar” also distinguishes stable businesses from those that are transitory or mobile, such as taco trucks.  The concerns of brick and mortar businesses, as distinct from the other two, are things such as foot traffic, storefront visibility and appealing interior design.  I would add to that list “meeting the needs of community residents” as well as attracting tourists or visitors.
           
     The Council discussed many potential improvements to the city, and I was encouraged by their creativity.  But at the end of the meeting Mr. Zigler showed a brief slide show of downtown sidewalk vendors he observed on his recent trip to Portland, Oregon.  He then showed a map of Lindsay, indicating places (all outside the downtown core) where such vendors could be encouraged to locate in our town.  The trick, he noted, would be to promote these businesses without detracting from the brick and mortar folks.
           
     The impact of the downtown Friday Night Market on brick and mortar businesses has not yet been evaluated, but it is finally clear, even to its most adamant proponents, that the effects have not been all that positive.  The financial contribution of the Friday market to the City of Lindsay is also unclear, and the council members were right to be interested in learning more, hopefully before pursuing more transitory/mobile businesses to our sidewalks outside the downtown core.
           
     But I would like to hear some thoughts (if not plans) for preserving the actual brick and mortar buildings of our downtown.  They are the essence of our small-town atmosphere, emblems of our community’s tenure here over time, holding the fort on another form of human interaction than the electronic one.  The image of the real quality of our town lives in those bricks and the mortar that, for the time being (but not forever,) holds them together, shaping environments that once sheltered viable businesses and community groups, and could do so once again.

    There is a place where bricks and mortar make a difference, and that’s in the downtowns of our cities, big and small.  Hand me my bucket, friends – we’ve got work to do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a carpenter’s daughter who writes.  You can send your downtown sidewalk dreams to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Dan and Zoe Delk for reconnecting last week!

Sticks and Stones

Published Sept. 21, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I walked into the post office the other day to pick up my mail and received a new bile aperture in the process, which some of you doubtless think I deserve.

           

     “I’ve been reading your articles,” the younger woman started carefully, realizing she’d just been handed the opportunity she’d been dreaming of:  telling me face to face what she thought.  It turns out she’s a Trump supporter and was offended by my anti-Trump sentiments being expressed in print.  "I don’t think you should say those things in the paper.” she continued.  “Everyone knows you're a liberal already.  You don’t have the right.”

           

     She grew angry as she developed her argument, and shaky as a result.  I could empathize, since the same thing happens to me when I suddenly have the opportunity to express my discontent to the person I think is causing it.  As we left the post office, she ended her testimony with a string of expletives about the presidential candidate she assumes I am supporting, all unprintable even as a quotation.  As we parted, she told me her name, which I think was Patricia, although, to be honest, her name disappeared as I digested what she had spoken.

           

     People are entitled to their opinions.  People are entitled to express their opinions in print, so long as they are identified as opinions and not a news article or a factual report.  There are other limiting criteria as well, like profanity and libel, for instance.  But as long as the speaker/writer claims his/her words as their opinion, the hearer/reader can keep opinion separate from fact.  The airwaves are kept free, and it maintains equality in a way:  each of us is entitled.

           

     Equality can be damaged by the presentation of opinion as fact:  it sets up a kind of authority that is unearned.  Reporters and even researchers sometimes slip their opinions into so-called factual writings, and detecting those becomes the art of critical thinking.  It is a painful art to practice because it leaves a person at odds with the promoters of these “facts,” as well as those who have bought into them as truth.  But without critical thinking we are simply sheep on the way to being shorn.

     Which brings me to the subject of name-calling.  I don’t know if kids these days still hurl this little saying around the playground, but when I was young we truly believed the rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”  On the east coast or in previous generations, they might have said “harm me,” but we used the word “hurt.”  The truth is, that was a lie.  Being called a name over and over again, especially a name that demeans, can cause long-lasting harm which can take decades to mend, far longer than it takes bones.

     And that’s what I’ve got against your candidate, Patricia.  He name-calls.  He name-calls over and over again until people start to believe it because nobody’s made him stop.  It’s libelous, what he’s done with “Crooked Hillary” and all the other disparaging names he made up for his Republican rivals.  It’s also juvenile.  It reflects an unwillingness to debate the facts, which he also avoids by spouting “facts” that he’s made up just for the fun of watching otherwise serious people scramble to identify the false portions of his half-truths, the most serious one being the promise that he’s on your side.

     It’s a con job, friend.  If you-all elect him, it’s going to be a rude awakening and a serious disappointment when his policies take you to the cleaners along with the rest of the country, while his rich friends (and himself) get richer.

           

     In my never-very-humble opinion (and that I admit,) Donald Trump is a name-caller.  And in order not to get hurt in this election, we’ve got to remember what we learned on the playground:  how to avoid being hurt by name-callers.  The lesson is simple in principle, but difficult in practice:  don’t listen. 

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural resident writer who still has to practice what she preaches.  Thanks to Patricia for speaking to me directly.  You can send your anti-name-caller experiences c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Eulogy Values

Published June 1, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times and a conservative commentator on PBS’s News Hour on Friday nights, gave a wonderful presentation in Fresno on May 10^th.  He was promoting his new book called “The Road to Character” which identifies two different value systems.  One he calls “resume” values (i.e., values that define professional success in this society,) and the other, “eulogy” values:  the things people say about you after you are dead and define you as a good person.

           

     “The argument in the book,” he told Fresno Bee reporter Tim Sheehan, “is that we spend a lot of time, especially in our educational system, on (developing) the resume virtues and not enough time on the eulogy (virtues) – are you a good person? – even though we know those are more important.”  He believes that “We’ve become a country that’s just really pleased with itself,” having become “a more narcissistic culture,” “over-politicized and under-moralized,” over the past half century.

           

     With the current level of political debate at the national level, it’s just a darned good time to be thinking about these distinctions.  The gap between these two values systems is where we find ourselves caught in this country.  When Donald Trump confided at the microphone that he was kinda hoping for the housing mortgage bubble to burst ‘way back in 2008, and then defended  himself when Democrats seized on that little revelation with “Hey, what am I supposed to do? I’m a businessman!” – he was trying to straddle that gap.  The fact that he normally stands with both feet on the businessman side apparently is still lost on his supporters.

           

     Or not. There are those who still believe that whatever is good for business is good for the country, that whatever trickles down is better than nothing, I guess.

           

     I believe in trickle up, which is always harder to defend, especially when resume values hold sway or are touted as the only ones that matter.  If we didn’t have to keep writing eulogies, we might forget the other system entirely.  But thankfully we do.  

           

     David Brooks may have been caught in that values gap recently when he wrote a story for the New York Times (republished May 19^th in the Bee) on the philanthropic contributions to the small Westside community of Lost Hills by land and water tycoons Lynda and Stewart Resnick of Paramount fame.  The Resnicks, both noticeably aging in the 2013 photo of them attending a community forum in that town, may be developing their own set of eulogy values for their bucket list.  (It should be noted that what they’re giving is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak: an infinitesimal percentage of their net worth.)  Brooks’ literary portrait of those contributions was sweet.  I hope it encourages the Resnicks to double or even triple their efforts.  

           

     But there is no way to offset the damage done to Lost Hills and myriad other Central Valley towns by the structure of political power and economic control created when one entity owns too much land.  You cannot offset the jobs lost in packinghouses from the plant closures and mechanization by Paramount (oops, sorry: Wonderful, Inc.)  You cannot offset the farming opportunities lost in citrus or nuts like pistachios and almonds; you can’t bring back the small pomegranate farmers they decimated several years ago when they thawed the frozen juice they’d been hoarding.  You can’t bring back the downtowns they destroyed when they sold off those communities’ water to southern California or pumped down the aquifers.  No amount of financial aid can offset the socio-political and economic damages inflicted by giant landholdings on communities. 

           

     The Resnics do not now, and probably never will wear Haloes, no matter how many dollars they drop on Lost Hills or how many other communities they attempt to rescue.  Like Donald Trump, they have one foot on each side of the resume/eulogy values gap, and when push comes to shove or some opportunity raises its snaky head, we’ll find them with both feet on the resume values side, not even blinking.

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Trudy Wischemann is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.  Thanks to Michele Hester and Mark Arax for their comments this week.  You can send your thoughts on rural philanthropy c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

The Party of Lincoln

Published in edited form May 11, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s been an unquiet week in my adopted home town, and anywhere else the television or radio has been on, thanks to the Donald and his band of happy followers.  Pundits, blue and red alike, have been swarming the microphones like bees whose hive has been hauled down the freeway in the middle of the afternoon, leaving them behind:  lost, and making lots of unhappy buzzing sounds.

     I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard very much that makes sense to me.  I’m sure it’s my lack of political acumen, whatever that is.  But whatever the Republicans or the Democrats are going to do as a result of the unspeakable prospect of the current presumptive Republican nominee winning the Presidency, it seems unlikely to make more sense.  The Republicans have been out-Republicaned; the Tea Party’s stash of tea has been dumped over the side of their ship.  The bullies in Washington have been out-bullied, and if the show must go on, it’s going to take some anti-bullying expertise, plain and simple, not a review of conservative values or party unification (except perhaps in performing a “bullying” intervention.)

           

     Speaking of conservative values, over the last few months I have noticed several Republican speakers referring to their party as “the party of Lincoln.”  I associate Lincoln and his presidency with far more liberal values, not to mention sensibilities of the common folk, than we see expressed regularly in either party today.  I found substance for that belief in Stephen Natoli’s book, Liberally Speaking (2015.)  After noting that the Republican Party “was founded in direct response to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which threatened to allow the extension of slavery into new Northern territories,” Natoli wrote:

“The Republican Party of those days was the more liberal party.  It stood for human rights over property rights, standing as it did for the restriction of slavery.  It stood for the precedence of nationally guaranteed human rights over the idea that ‘state’s rights’ permitted localities to nullify national laws or void human freedoms when and where they wished.  It stood for nationally-encouraged economic modernization and development that helped the people.”

           

     The creation of the Party of Lincoln was preceded by the creation of a third party called the Free Soil Party after the Wilmot Proviso, which would have prohibited slavery in the southwestern territories acquired from Mexico (including California,) was defeated in Congress:

           

“Disappointed by the ambivalent position of the Whig Party toward slavery, ‘Conscience’ Whigs held a convention in August 1848 at Buffalo, N.Y.  There they were joined by delegates from 17 states drawn from the Liberty Party and the antislavery faction of the New York Democrats, known as ‘Barnburners.’  The Free-Soilers’ historic slogan calling for ‘free soil, free speech, free labor and free men’ attracted small farmers, debtors, village merchants, and household and mill workers....  In 1854 the disorganized remnants of the party were absorbed into the newly formed Republican Party, which carrie54 the disorganized remnants of the party were absorbed into the newly formed Republican Party, which carrigh several party memd the Free-Soil idea of opposing the expansion of slavery one step further by condemning slavery as a moral evil as well.”  (“Free Soil Party,”Encyclopedia Britannica, online.)

     We might ask “Are we at a similar moment now, where dissatisfaction with the status quo in Washington could lead to the creation of a new party?”  I don’t think so, but maybe it’s just my lack of political acumen again.

     I watched the supporters behind the Donald on tv this morning, one holding a sign that read “The silent majority stands with Donald Trump.”  I think about them often, that silent majority.  I think they’ve fallen in love with someone who can speak his mind, even if that mind is like a sailboat with no rudder.  They stand with him because they cannot stand up for themselves.  And I worry for them because, from years past I know how it feels to discover that the one you fell so hard for, hoping to be redeemed, doesn’t really see you and has been using you all along to bolster his fragile (if bombastic) ego, that his words were lightly filled balloons barely tied.  It always feels bad, but the result can be good.  I just hope that therapeutic and truly redemptive moment happens before November.

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Trudy Wischemann is an apolitical pundit who writes in Lindsay.  You can send her your opinions on this election c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.