Come On Home

Published in edited form Jan. 17, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“You’ve got to exert your ownership over the place you live in,
        or you won’t have that place.”
               
                Bruce Springsteen, saying what the song “This Land is Your Land” means
                in the PBS documentary on Woody Guthrie, "I Ain't Got No Home."


     “Do you have to fight about everything?” a friend asked in an unfriendly voice.  We were talking about Lindsay’s proposed roundabout at Hermosa and Westwood, adjacent to Jefferson School and half a block from the entrances to the Olive Tree Plaza.  “I wish I didn’t,” is what I wish I had answered her.           

    
    I’ve got a thing against fighting.  Most of us do.  I got mine from my small-town mother, who abhors fighting in general and understands the underside of the silent class wars that go on in small towns.  Better to go along and be friendly or at least not noticed, because standing out can make you an outsider fast.

           

     But a small handful of Lindsay residents, most of them lifetime members, got up the gumption to gather signatures on a petition against this project.  They gathered over 800 names in four days, 300 more people than voted in the last election.  They overcame their fears about fighting city hall, motivated by concerns about the negative impacts of this project.  I think more of us need to join them.

           

     At the next City Council meeting, Jan. 23^rd (which begins at 6 p.m.), the staff will address some of the questions raised at the public hearing on Jan. 9^th as well as some raised at the public information meeting Jan. 4^th.  The Council then will decide whether to approve the environmental document prepared by the city planning department, a requirement of CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act.)  This is the only point where citizen input has to be considered.  After that, the Council is free to approve the plan regardless what the public thinks or feels about it.

           

     There are genuine defects in the environmental document.  With the aid of experts in the fields of traffic engineering and design, the San Joaquin Valley Environmental Defense Center will address technical flaws in the report.  What is really absent, however, is public participation and a public vision of the town’s future.

           

     There’s a song by the Milk Carton Kids called “The Ash and Clay” which pertains to our situation.  I first heard it at the end of a movie about a rural community that nearly fell prey to a corporation seeking to drill natural gas wells through their aquifer, potentially contaminating their only source of water.  Many in the community wanted the leases as a way to survive financially in an area whose economic base was waning.  A few fighters struggled against both the corporation and the general community’s fears of repercussions, and I thought the film represented well the struggle of public resources and community well-being.  Some lines from the song, however, capture this moment perfectly:

“I know we want what’s best for us – I know it has to come at a price;
I also know the trouble that you find when you stop being nice.
You look around you one day; what you once knew didn’t stay….
Come on home before the girls are grown, come on home to fight.” 

           

     Come be part of the solution Tuesday night, Lindsay City Council chambers, 6 p.m.

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Trudy Wischemann is a small-town researcher who always has a song in her head.  You can send her your thoughts about our roundabouts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247

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.