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.

 

Square Minus-One

Published August 17, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     It was a busy week in Lake Woebehere, my adopted home town.  The Lindsay City Council filled the vacancy made by Steven Mecum’s resignation with Brian Watson, assuring Councilmembers Kimball and Salinas that whatever they and the city staff want, they will have.  

     The Council also ratified the mistake they made when they appointed Bill Zigler to fill the city manager vacancy when Rich Wilkinson flew the coop with severance pay Pam Kimball arranged back when they used him to fill the vacancy Scot Townsend made when he flew the coop.  Bill Zigler, who once filled the position of Lindsay’s city planner, having no training or experience in planning, is now our permanent city manager with no training or experience except that which he’s received as interim, not to mention lacking the personal integrity required to make government transparency possible.

     So I guess you could say we’re back to square one, although I don’t know what date I’d put on that square.  The dreamy, smoke-and- mirror days of Scot Townsend’s regime are gone, with the hope of Lindsay’s revival stuck in the mud of reality his plans left us.  Much of the scheme remains, however, and will need to be watched if we’re not to be plunged further backward. 

     The next four months before the election will be interesting, if for no other reason than to watch Brian Watson recuse himself.  Mr. Watson lives in the house Jim Hunter bought from Signa Ellerding, the once-beautiful property on Parkside just north of the park and community center that Hunter subdivided to build three new houses which miraculously became homes to some of the city’s new employees the Townsend administration flew in from Utah to man the new McDermont facility.  Jim Hunter also obtained the land across from that house and had planned to build a large,upscale subdivision to fill the space between the redeveloped park, the Wellness Center and the new elementary school.  That subdivision, had it been completed by Mr. Hunter, at least would have provided the curbs and sidewalks to the elementary school the city eventually had to provide at taxpayer expense after 3 years of kids walking in mud.  

     Before he was appointed to Mecum’s seat, Brian Watson suggested to the Council that he had a solution to a problem of which the Council might not be aware:  the fact that few teachers in the Lindsay Unified School District actually live in our town.   Actually, they’d heard it before.  When Jim Hunter lived in town, it was proposed that the reason for this non-resident teaching cadre was the lack of decent housing for them to purchase, and that providing more decent housing would return us to our former glory days when most teachers lived in town.  I don’t know if anyone has asked the teachers why they prefer to live elsewhere; in my view, the Q:A was entirely self-serving.  But that was the plan.

     Mr. Hunter was also involved in building the townhouses just south of the new Wellness Center on former hospital district land which had to be converted to Section 8 housing which the city had to turn over to the county because Lindsay was incapable of operating it within the law.  In fact, they barely finished building it.  I mention this simply because it’s hard to remember everything that went on during that whirlwind time.

      In the meantime, nothing has been done to preserve the historic quality or economic viability of Lindsay’s downtown and much has been done to erode it.  The plan to put a Dollar General store on the southeast corner of the roundabout has returned, same developer, same beneficiaries, same lack of traffic or economic analysis to determine whether this site or business is appropriate.  That might sound like a boon to you, but that location is unlikely to stimulate customers to venture two blocks south to the main street where a handful of businesses have been gallantly trying to keep us anchored to that stretch.   

     And in the meantime, what once was Kisling’s Auto Parts and is now Napa, the last locally-owned auto parts store downtown, is going out of business.  When I went to commiserate, the young man at the counter said “It’s sad, really sad.  But Lindsay is just drying up.”  Four years ago, had the City considered my request to change the location of the proposed Dollar General store to a more central location, such as the Stamper Motors site that is now infinitely available having had the ancient brick building demolished by a Thanksgiving weekend fire in 2014, perhaps the increased business traffic could have saved Napa.  But that’s water under the bridge.  By the way, have you heard that Hanford plans to build a McDermont-like facility?  That should be fun, competing for events with a city that size.

     So that’s the news from Lake Woebehere, where the residents need to get stronger and more vigilant in monitoring city hall if we want any of our authentic community to remain.  Meet me in the council chambers at 6 p.m. on the 2^nd and 4^th Tuesdays of the month.  Maybe we can work our way back up to Square One if we try.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  Deep thanks to Colleen Childers all these years for her support and her love of Pepper’s Market, now MIA.  Send your thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

           

Data Crunching

Published Jan. 14, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last week’s warm, spring-like weather had me crunching some raw data I mentioned in my previous column.  “Data crunching” is just academic slang for processing facts in some way that shows relationships between categories of things.


     My processing began in the form of laundry.  I washed piles of clothes from my past, looking for clues to my true identity as a child of God despite the clear evidence of massive strokes of sin.  A flannel shirt from my field work days, for instance, helped offset some guilty-looking underwear.  A pair of jeans I’ll never squeeze back into reminded me I once thought size 12 was large.  Examining one’s conscience through the lens of previous wardrobes can be a growth experience in humility, one trait of the saintly.  But hanging wet stuff on the clothesline, letting it dry in full view, preparing for its new life as a rag or thrift shop donation - man, that’s cathartic.


     I keep wondering how Val is doing with his data crunching.  His job is a little different from mine:  he’s got to organize his raw data well enough to contradict the data provided by his clerk.  His data need to provide a different picture of relationships than the one her data paints.  His data have to convince a panel of people not from his home town or county that he’s a child of God qualified enough to keep serving up justice here at home despite the clouds on his apparent character.  All I have to do is convince my internal judge and jury that I qualify to keep breathing.


     When I crunch the data in the judicial committee’s report, the relationship I see is one of invidious paternalism.  He was trying to take over her life.  With the anonymous letter accusing her of having an affair with another court employee, supposedly sent to her husband’s workplace and cc’d to Judge Val, he was inserting himself between her and her husband as well as the other employee with whom she was still on a friendly basis.  By instructing her to tell no one about the letter, he was also inserting himself between her and her other friends.  He then began depositing cash into her bank accounts and providing other luxuries, from AAA coverage to a BMW.  As benign as he tried to make these look, they are steps toward a predatory relationship, how paternalism goes ugly.  Ask any daughter of incest.


     I probably wouldn’t mention this again except for the possibility that Judge Val has been using his power in other inappropriate ways, particularly within our community.  The most blatant example I know was his signing the LPD’s search and arrest warrants over a 3-day weekend in the unwarranted arrest of Councilman Mecum last year.  The Saucedo’s home is three doors down from Lindsay’s police station, which made it convenient, I’m sure.  But his past history on the city council and multiple terms as mayor leave too strong a connection to City Hall to guarantee impartiality in evaluating the validity of those warrants.  Most judges refuse to sign warrants in the communities in which they live simply to avoid the appearance of potential conflict of interest.


     The other was his attendance at Lindsay City Council meetings during the LARGo lawsuit on CEQA violations and neglect of historic preservation provisions in Lindsay’s outdated general plan.  I didn’t know it at the time, but that may have been a violation of the judicial ethics code.  At the time, however, I felt it was some kind of betrayal of the community, his appearance and comments meant to sway the Council back toward the staff’s direction at a time when they were beginning to move away.


     I hope the community will come to understand that the loss of this “local hero” may in fact be a gain for our efforts to build real democratic process.  Maybe it’s time Val did some laundry.
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Trudy Wischemann is writer who loves to get her hands into soapy water and make things clean.  You can send her your data crunching stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.