Home Land

Published Dec. 13, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the old song opens, and finishes “if only in my dreams.”  In between the beginning and end, the lyrics describe a peopled place, with weather and vegetation we have to go away to get, sitting here on the Valley floor.  Maybe the Sierra.  Maybe Dunsmuir, on the toes of Mt. Shasta.  Maybe Michigan.

           

     The imagination is a wonderful place.  You can find yourself winging home in a song.  And for most of us, “home” has geographic coordinates, a place on the map.  Thanks to that Mother, Change, we may not actually want to go there anymore, but the homing instinct mentally remains to that place we once called home.

           

     Do the people of Israel feel that way about Jerusalem?  As the site of the Holy City in the Bible, the three thousand years of history as the center of the faith that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed over the weekend, meeting in France with its new President Macron, it’s easy to feel compassion for the Israelites.  Our President has given them a great big Christmas present:  home.  In “their” land.

           

     Unfortunately, they are not the only ones to feel that Jerusalem is home.  That city is still the center of faith for the Palestinians and other Muslims, in that region and beyond.  It is also home for Armenian Christians, as my friend Caitlin Croughan reminded me on the phone Sunday.  She visited Jerusalem last year and brought me an Armenian cross from their quarter of town.

           

     She also raised an important point about political states and religious nations.  Our forefathers and mothers built America on the principle of separating politics from religion as a way of protecting religious freedom.  We believe in that.  Many nation-states do not.  Israel appears to be one of them.  That’s their business, but it surely is not ours.

           

     So why did our fearless leader hand them this gift?  Cait thinks it was actually a gift to Mike Pence and his fundamentalist followers.  Something to do with the Book of Revelations, apparently, which is strikingly clear to some about the meaning of the preceding 65 Books.  I’m not a scholar of Scripture, so I can’t help you out there.

           

     What little I do know about the Bible concerns land, particularly the notion of the Promised Land.  It’s a big topic that was opened by Walter Brueggemann in the late 1970’s, and has continued scantily into the present.  The main concept Brueggemann uncovered (for me) is the idea of Covenant.  The land was promised to the Israelites as part of the covenant with their God.  It was a gift, the gift of sustenance and placedness, but it was His half of the bargain.  Israel’s half, in return for abundance and security, was to love their God with all their strength, soul and might and to keep His commandments, which unfortunately have been broken century after century (especially in the West Bank and Gaza most recently.)

           

     Does Netanyahu remember the teachings about Exile?  How the Jews lost Jerusalem over and over again, and why?  More importantly for the current news, however, is this question:  does Donald Trump even know?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who stays home for Christmas in Lindsay.  You can send her your home-based dreams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

The Right to Labor

Published Sept. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     High clouds dim the heat and light this Labor Day morning as I sit down to write, a good day for reflection.  I am celebrating this holiday by exerting my right to labor, even though it is unpaid.  Writing is what I do.

     Many people are celebrating this day by exerting their right to not labor.  On my brief jaunt between Exeter and Lindsay this morning I saw bicyclists coming down off Rocky Hill, exhilarated by their exertions.  Others will celebrate this right to not work by going shopping, cashing in on the Labor Day sales, which have wiped out the right to not work for hundreds of thousands of retail employees who might rather be up at the lake with their friends or attending backyard barbecues.  Thanks to our cultural tendency to celebrate too much, hundreds of thousands of service employees like nurses, EMT’s, rangers and police must also clock in.  Some will even get paid extra for it.

     On my quick trip this morning I saw many others exerting their right to work:  a farmer sitting in his pickup while running furrows in an old orange grove; a farmworker towing a spray rig through rows of citrus; an irrigator on a Kawasaki checking valves in baby mandarins.  A man I know is out near Ivanhoe installing a Blue-Tooth in a harvesting rig for a large walnut grower whose family has been working all weekend getting ready for the shakers.  Walnut growers all over our region are doing the same, their families and employees working overtime.  In farming the days are determined by the progress of the crops, not the calendar.  It’s part of the beauty of farming, if occasionally also part of the grief.

     But mostly my mind is contemplating the larger issue of the right to labor at all.  I started this weekend being interviewed on KFCF’s radio program “Down on the Farm” with Tom Willey.  Tom is an organic farmer in Madera who’s been laboring to feed folks decent food for 40 years, as well as generating programs that promote the small farmer and sustainable agriculture.  For the interview I was joined by Dan O’Connell, a Ph.D. from Cornell who’s worked up farmland conservation easements for Sequoia Riverlands Trust and American Farmland Trust for years and helped start Fresno’s Food Commons.  Dan has organized a speakers series on sustainable ag this fall at the Reedley Peace Center, and the speakers include some of the most important academics and community organizers who have contributed to questions of social justice and environmental quality in our food system for the last 80 years.  The interview with these two men tied up many threads and was mind-enhancing. 

     Then, reading Mark Arax’s phenomenal essay “Phantoms in the fields” in yesterday’s Fresno Bee, the important link between land and the right to labor became clear.  Mark’s story went beyond journalism, portraying the portion of the food system we inhabit locally in our neighborhoods as well as our fields, our politics as well as our plantings. What I saw in his verbal painting was how the right to labor, to earn a living, is determined by the ownership of land.  It is a terrible irony that right now, as some celebrate last week’s legislation increasing the number of hours of overtime pay farm laborers can now receive, their jobs are being eliminated by farmers’ shifts in crops from raisins to almonds, which is, essentially, a decision to mechanize.  No crop is free of this shift, not even olives. Both in the fields and the packinghouses, the landowners’ race is on to replace men and women with machines.

     Perhaps if we understood the “flood” of immigrants from Mexico and points south as being driven by dispossession from land on which people have labored for centuries, people coming here to exert their right to labor somehow, some way, we might seek different solutions.  Until then, building a wall is just an idea for Humpty Trumpty to sit on and make himself feel king-like.  Keep watch for the inevitable.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a rural researcher who writes.  Thanks to Perla Soria for her educated interest in these issues.  Send your labor rights ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.