Rose-Colored Glasses

Published in slightly edited form July 26, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     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.

 

Hearing Voices

Published August 26, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s been an unquiet week in Lake Woebehere, my adopted hometown.  With paycuts, petitions, and the usual propaganda, some of Lindsay’s many voices have been speaking outloud.  Sorting the messages has kept me busy, although I think the cacophony is a healthy sign.

     Underneath that din, there have been other voices wafting through my days.  One is my cat Dot’s, who wakes slightly earlier than I do with a bleat, not a meow.  She is old, growing more frail by the month, and deaf enough to be confused by sounds rather than guided by them.  An affectionate lick by one of the others or her own sneeze can knock her down.  When I look at her, I often see her entire life passing before my eyes.  Her time is coming to return to dust.

     When she arrived at my house as a kitten, she was just a speck.  Two girls found her and her brother in the park one evening, wandering around with their eyes glued shut by mucus.  The girls brought them here, and though I already had enough cats, I also had a tube of antibiotic eye ointment in the feline medicine cabinet.  The girls did not, so I was the kittens’ best chance.  That was June 1998.  I’ve never been sorry.  

     I’ve been sorry about the park, however.  Where the kittens were born, near the hospital bordered by the orange grove, where you could sit on the grass watching kids run around like banshees and feel like you were out in the country - that place is gone.  It’s buried under the concrete and blacktop of Ono City Parkway.  The missing orange grove is now just a paragraph in the resolution permitting the development of an up-scale housing subdivision there.  That paragraph required the developer to remove the trees section by section as building progressed.  Instead, he bulldozed the entire grove to install the underground utilities, which he never finished.  Now his plans have turned to dust along with the ground itself.

     So another voice I’m hearing is the sound of my own regret.  I hid my eyes as the City began destroying the park to build the aquatic center.  When I finally woke up, saw what was planned and realized we should try to save the part they hadn’t deranged, it was too late.  The photographs they used to get the grant from the state to renovate the park showed its terrible condition but didn’t mention that the City was the agent of that destruction.  When I called the state seeking help in delaying the renovation until public input could be included in the design, they didn’t believe me and forged ahead, turning our once pastoral place into an urbanized space.

    
     Arm-in-arm with regret are the voices of betrayal.  Sitting in the Memorial Building Thursday evening for a community meeting on the proposed rate increases for sewer and garbage, I was jolted by flashbacks of two meetings almost 4 years ago.  

     In one I heard the voice of Mike Camarena, director of city services, telling many of these same people in that same room how the park redesign would suit their needs.  When he discovered that the audience had other ideas and that they would rather see the funds used to fix their neighborhood streets, he “misspoke” about deadlines on the source of funding.  In the other flashback I heard the voice of Bill Zigler, our new interim city manager, reassuring these citizens who came to a city council meeting to request input on the park’s redesign that “There will be swings.”  Swings were at the top of their list.  There still are no swings.

     Friday, when I asked Bill and Mike why there still are no swings in the park, they responded that they have other priorities.  May they be hearing voices soon.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer trained in environmental planning who is mortified by this city’s priorities.  You can send her your list c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a comment below.