Strangers In This Land

Published July 13, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


           I had a wake-up call Saturday that helped me put of last week’s violent national events in perspective. 

            I witnessed an accident at the intersection of Spruce Road and Ave. 256.  Heading west on 256, as I approached the 4-way stop, I saw a very small car ram the side of a utility trailer being pulled by a pickup truck turning north onto Spruce.  The small car, which had been heading south on Spruce, ran the stop sign, which the pickup driver did not expect.  He’d have been able to dodge the oncoming car if he hadn’t been towing the trailer.  Both vehicles came to a sudden, unmovable halt in the middle of the intersection.

            Luckily, no one was hurt, and luckily a CHP officer was driving only a few cars behind the crash.  The officer, a Latino man, competently helped the three white folks in the tiny car get safely to the side of the road, checking to make sure the fluids leaking from it were not flammable.  He assisted the pickup truck driver with the limping trailer, who was also white, to a safe parking spot, then pushed the crumpled compact onto the opposite corner.  Danger over.

            The three people in the car that ran the stop sign were tourists from Switzerland, a young couple and a middle-aged woman.  The younger woman was about 4 months pregnant, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how this accident could have been much worse.  “Is she alright?” the driver of the pickup asked when I went to see if he was.  His trailer and his plans for the evening were not alright:  one tire was blown off the rim and the trailer’s once-neatly-stacked contents were all askew.  He was on his way to cater a party, scheduled to arrive in thirty minutes, and Plan B was struggling to surface in his mind.

            To me the accident was a reminder that we tend to take it for granted that everybody knows the lay of the land, from 4-way stop intersections to places on the road where the sun can be blinding at certain times of the day.  We subconsciously learn to navigate by these facts: the landscape trains us through experience.  But strangers in this land haven’t had the benefit of these years of experience, and accidents can happen.  It’s tourist season, friends:  keep alert for the untrained.

             Of course I asked myself if things might have gone differently if the tourists were from Nigeria, or Nicaragua, or worse, East LA.  Would the first words out of the pickup driver’s mouth have been concern for the pregnant woman, or would he have felt more defensive, feeling the impacts on his own life these strangers had caused?  I don’t mean to impugn the pickup driver here: the question is directed to all of us.

            Last week’s national events between police officers and people of color, which appear to be continuing into this week and likely the future, were triggered by fear of the unknown, which is the source of hate.  We are strangers to each other:  we come from different social landscapes, we have not received the same training, and as a result we cannot predict what the other will do with any certainty.  We become guarded at best, enemies at worst.

             The Quaker peace activist Elise Boulding once suggested that the word “stranger” is a good replacement for the word “enemy:”

            “It is a very old word, and a good one.  We have no more enemies, but we have strangers.  Sometimes we are estranged from ourselves and from God.  When we meet a person we call a stranger, that person has to be listened to….    There is no tribal group to my knowledge that does not have a tradition for dealing with the stranger.  That is, when a person you have no way of labelling or categorizing appears on the horizon, that person is defined as a stranger… until some basis for relationship has been found….Oddly enough, we have lost it in industrial society.  Therefore we have enemies.  We don’t have rituals for deciding on the basis for relationship.”  (in One Small Plot of Heaven, 1989, quoted in Whitmire’s Plain Living, 2001.)

             It seems to me that the communities requiring their public safety officers to become familiar with them have a better chance of reducing the unknown in police/community member encounters.  Those of us who have become strangers to ourselves and our families through drug abuse and gangs might even have a better chance of becoming reacquainted under their influence. 

             I think it’s time we get to know each other and ourselves better – before all hell breaks loose.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate in Tulare County’s terra incognita.  You can send her your stories of refamiliarization c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Life Without Garrison

Published July 6, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

“It’s been a quiet week in Lake Woebegone, my home town…”  That half sentence can only be spoken in one voice in my mind, that of Garrison Keillor, originator of the public radio program “A Prairie Home Companion.”  For those of us with certain sensibilities, Keillor’s creation, both the program and the imaginary place in Minnesota, has been a safe haven for decades.  But this past Saturday night was Garrison’s last turn at the mike, and what life is going to be like without him is a bewilderment.

 

            He retired before, taking the whole show with him.  But public acclaim and hunger brought him (and the show) back.  This time his exit appears to be for real, as health issues have put him on notice that his life-long understanding of himself as terminal is also for real.  The show will stay and transform; Garrison will go onward to write until his air runs out, letting us hear his voice in our heads until our own air runs out.

 

            There were interviews with his show co-hosts on public radio last week, and I listened, rapt, whenever I could.  One musician who had worked with Keillor for the past 15 years said he is still in awe of his genius, not something everyone can say about their boss after that long.  He also said he still can’t imagine life without Garrison, which gave me the title for this column.

 

            The beautiful thing about Keillor’s words, whether they be printed or spoken, is that they are infused with the understanding that we are all terminal, part of the flow of life, and that it is exactly this flow that brings us the experience of beauty.  Garrison specializes in the exceptional beauty of every-day happenings in “unexceptional” lives, beauty that is democratic at root, available to all.  No matter where I was living, whether Berkeley, Long Island, Davis or Lindsay, many Saturday evenings I was brought to tears welling up from that very truth.

 

            For a long time I thought the program’s attraction to me was that it was rooted in what it means to be rural.  For some people, that makes it feel nostalgic, as if rural life has no traction any more.  I don’t believe that, but even people living in Minneapolis are far enough removed from that reality to feel like they’re looking “backward.” 

 

            David Brooks’ new book, The Road to Character, offers another frame to look through, however: an American cultural shift from self-effacement to self-promotion.  Keillor’s Lake Woebegone belongs to the older order, and for those of us raised with that sensibility, it feels more like home than where we live now.

 

            Something one of the co-hosts said in an interview, however, gave it a more spiritual lens.  The interviewer had remarked how interesting it was that, though Garrison himself doesn’t look back, he asks us, his audience, to look back all the time.  The co-host changed the interpretation: he said “Garrison’s work constantly points to the gap between God and man.”  When we find ourselves in that appropriate relation, it feels holy.

 

            When I left Long Island to come back to California and start over as a rural advocate, I wanted to paint the words “Lake Woebegone or Bust” on the left flank of my old Datsun.  With this new understanding of why the words that came out of Garrison’s mouth meant so much, I think it’s still a desirable destination, an immortal goal.  May Mr. Keillor enjoy the tail end of his tenure here, reward for a job well done.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  Thanks to Larry Ginsberg for reading my words.  Send your favorite stories from Lake Woebegone to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

The Longest Days

Published June 22, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


            Here we are, at the apex of day-length.  I wait for these days all winter, counting the months, then the weeks until we reach this pinnacle of Solstice: the moment where we have the maximum minutes of UV’s, the ultimate intimacy with the sun’s light (which my body somehow craves.)  From here the days get infinitesimally shorter, even as our exposure to the sun gets more intense.  We will pass through some uncomfortable, even dangerous days before we are wishing again for more time with the sun.

            I wonder if we aren’t in a similar place in the political life of our nation, with all its social ramifications.  Approaching the November elections, we find ourselves exposed to longer days of political dialogue and social commentary as the party platforms try to solidify from the inflated rafts and rubber inner-tubes of the primaries, the mergers of candidate’s supporters and radicalized voters.  At the local and state levels, the results so far have been sortof predictable, but the run for President has been momentous enough to capture my attention.  I find myself trying to understand us as a totality in a way I’ve never attempted before.  We will pass through some uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous days before we can count the votes, evaluate the results, and move on gratefully toward Thanksgiving.

             And then there’s the events of last week.  The praises for the life of Muhammed Ali had barely begun to sink into the soft earth of our hearts when they were machine-gunned by a disturbed man in Orlando and we had to confront once again the tragedies of violence.  Our cultural aversion to looking at this fact of our lives can be measured by the media’s knee-jerk reaction.  “Is this Islamic terrorism?” they asked, wanting like the rest of us to find the cause beyond our borders.  It can’t be us.  It can’t be a bad gene in our cultural DNA.  It can’t be that the solo Marlboro Man image of American masculinity no longer has any hope of being experienced in our compromised lives or traded in for a more cooperative vision of man-in-community.  It can’t be us, can it?

                There was the heroic filibuster by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who claimed the floor for 15 hours seeking legislative response to the now-too-common mowing-down of innocents by madmen with guns.  "It wasn't just that 40 senators came to the floor and supported my effort to get these votes but there were millions of people all across the country who rose up and who joined our effort," Murphy said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."  Those Senators put in a very long day, and I took heart from their actions but the encouragement was short lived.  As of this writing, pundits expect no meaningful legislation to pass.  It appears that we are lightyears away from overcoming our fears and the gun lobby’s resistance to limit civilian access to weapons of war.  Meanwhile other tragedies occurred that had nothing to do with assault rifles, including the drowning death of a two-year-old boy who was towed underwater by an alligator at a Disney resort, and a young woman British lawmaker who was shot and stabbed to death for speaking her mind.  Dear God, be with the families, whose days will stretch on like life sentences in solitary confinement for awhile.

            I think we need to look at ourselves long and hard in light of these events, to make use of the light they provide.  Who do we hate, and why?  Who do we fear?   What can any one of us do to reduce hate and fear in the world and to short-circuit the killing response, whether it be toward alligators or vocal women or young people out for a good time in what was perceived by them to be a safe haven?  Dear God, be with us on these longest days.

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Trudy Wischemann is a regular old heterosexual woman who speaks her mind in print.  You can do the same by writing a letter to the editor of this paper or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

United We Fall

Published June 15, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

 

            A couple of years ago I wrote a column called “Divided We Stand,” focused on Lindsay and the outside media’s criticism of the city council for having differences of opinion that kept it from “moving forward.”  I argued then that moving forward without considering, much less resolving those differences would not be an advance in civic government, but rather yet another example of the community’s old-time insiders overlooking and overriding the legitimate concerns of the community’s newcomers.

 

            I’d like to make a similar argument now at the national level and the cry for “unity” coming from leaders of both political parties.  Astounded by the popular support for “insurgent” candidates on each side, the standard-bearers of both parties have called for unity at moments when it seemed they might reign in the dissidents on the fringe and regain control.  They were wrong.

 

            Republican voters gave their leaders the finger and plopped Trump in their lap.  The result?  Now calls for party unity would mean abandoning hope for consistent expression of conservative values, not to mention civil discourse.  We don’t hear those calls quite so much now as Trump’s loose cannon approach to campaigning, with its blatant irreverence for the legitimate concerns of every group except workingclass white males, creates canyons between himself and Republican standards of decency.

 

            Voters with concerns not so different than Trump supporters’ brought Bernie Sanders neck and neck with Hillary Clinton despite the early naysayers, who then played the unity card once he rounded the last bend hard on her flank and made her jockeys bring out the whip.  The working people of all ethnicities and genders found themselves held up in his campaign, their concerns honored both in his rhetoric and his solutions.  To “unify” the party before the presumptive nominee had made commitments to those concerns would have been an act of violence comparable to what happened in the Republican party, even though reverse.

 

            I was terribly impressed last week by the 5-minute speech Bernie Sanders made in front of the White House after conferring with President Obama.  (You can watch it on YouTube or I can send you the transcription.)  Rather than concede defeat in order to “unify” the party, Sanders said “We will continue doing everything that we can to oppose the current drift toward an oligarchic society where a handful of billionaires exercise enormous power over our economic, political, and media life.”  The media missed that part, by and large, emphasizing his vow “to do everything in my power – and I will work as hard as I can – to make sure Donald Trump does not become President of the United States,” which is an extension of the first statement in my mind.

 

            Sanders put his finger on the problem of unity for the Republicans:  that it will divide them from the vast percentage of American voters and American values.  “Donald Trump would clearly, to my mind and I think the minds of the majority of Americans, be a disaster as President of the United States.  It is unbelievable to me, and I say this in all sincerity, that the Republican Party would have as a candidate for President, who in the year 2016, makes bigotry and discrimination the cornerstone of his campaign.  In my view, the American people will not vote for or tolerate a candidate who insults Mexicans and Latinos, who insults Muslims, who insults African-Americans and women.”

 

            I truly appreciate the way the Democrats are handling the Sanders campaign, even if it is driven by the need to garner the power of his supporters.  This is a perfect example of what our votes mean:  they count, especially when they express a significant proportion of the needs and concerns of people in this country.  May we stand strongly divided until real change is conceived, lest we fall from grace under the pretense of unity.

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Trudy Wischemann is an agrarian activist who writes.  You can send her your campaign thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Going to the Polls

Published June 8, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Did you make it?  Did you go to the polls to vote?  I wish I’d been there to join you if you did, but that privilege has been taken away from me by the County.  Now I have to vote by mail, as many of you do.  For some people, this is a privilege they choose over taking time from Tuesday.  I miss going to the polls, however.

     Rita Woodard, our Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector/Registrar of Voters since 2007, says she’s only responding to State law when her office determines who votes by mail.  I’ll accept that.  During the 2012 election, the first one I discovered that I’d been relegated to this category (as did hundreds of other Lindsay voters, with much chaos ensuing,) she informed me that voting by mail increases voter turnout.  I think it’s possible that voluntary vote-by-mail balloting does increase voter turnout.  I think it’s also possible that the involuntary sort might actually be responsible for some of these low voter turnout numbers the media has been flashing in our faces this year.

     Did you notice when yours came in the mail last month?  Did you fill it out right away and send it in?  Or did you want to wait until you’d heard the last-minute appeals from candidates to make up your mind?  Because if you decided to wait and take your ballot to the polls (like it says you can in the instructions,) your ballot will not be counted until after the regular ballots are all tallied, weeks after the results have been announced.

     Did you sign it in the right spot on the envelope?  Did you use the same signature that you have on file at the Registrar of Voters office?  Have you checked the website to see whether or not your ballot was counted?  I hope that my signature still resembles the one I filed in 1993,but I haven’t yet checked to see whether the person who examined my envelope thought it does.  All of which is to say that I voted, but don’t yet know whether it counted or not.

     So let me just state outright that I think there’s a lot more room for uncertainty in this shift from going to the polls to voting by mail, and it makes me uncomfortable.  That’s one reason that I miss going to the polls.

     The other reason is the loss of sense of my membership in community, both locally and countrywide.  There’s just something about standing in line with my neighbors that dignifies the act of voting and solidifies my sense of residence here.  There’s something about standing at the little portable booths they set up in the Veterans Memorial Building that reminds me it’s a solemn duty of citizenship in the United States of America and that I have that important right.  That sense of participation is honored when I pass by the names on the building’s entrance of people who have died in multiple wars defending that right. At least I voted.

     And I voted early for a change, not wanting to risk my chance to be counted.  After dropping my ballot in the mail, I attended rallies for the two Democratic candidates for President, and might have changed my mind if it weren’t too late to do so.  That’s the third reason I miss going to the polls.

     Reform of the voting system is heavy on the hearts and minds of our national leaders at the moment.  I hope that won’t include not going to the polls.  I wish there were some way to address my concerns at the local level, however.  Anybody else miss going to the polls?

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Trudy Wischemann is an agrarian advocate who writes.  Thanks to Bob Welch in Exeter for his comments this week. You can send your nostalgic voting memories 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 Incontinent Divide

Published May 25, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     In Saturday’s Fresno Bee, Andrew Fiala, Director of the Ethics Center at Fresno State, wrote a whole-hearted column defending the place of enlightenment in our nation’s constitution and educational system.  Although I have worked hard to become a reputable and responsible product of that system, his column left me feeling torn, like someone standing with the Great Continental Divide running between each foot.  

           

     I admire and like Dr. Fiala:  he came to speak at Lindsay’s Cultural Arts Center last fall about the cultural roots of violence, and his research appeared to me to be useful and important.  In writing a regular column for the Bee, Fiala is spreading that usefulness beyond the university’s bounds, much like what I try to do with my column in this paper.  I see him as an ally. 

           

     But Saturday’s piece traced a fault line that runs through this country’s mentality between the so-called enlightened and the so-called unenlightened, a strike-slip fault like the San Andreas where each side inexorably moves in the opposite direction of the other, tearing up the zone between them.  In defining and defending “enlightenment,” Fiala was trying to describe the sometimes invisible place of liberal values in this otherwise conservative region.  But knowledge, that hoped-for product of enlightenment thinking, does not always lead down a liberal path, or even a progressive one.

           

     Over the last 100 years some of the world’s greatest political tyrants have been highly educated (Cambodia’s Pol Pot, for example.)  Universities have produced some of the hardest-line conservatives the world has known, and not just in the area of national defense.  Decades of promulgation of the Green Revolution and the structure of agribusiness around the world have destroyed native cultures and ecologies whose knowledge bases and ways of living were sustainable.  They were replaced by what is not sustainable at great cost to people, places and the future of the world.  The hope I once had for enlightenment thinking has been replaced by a giant suspicion of academics not unlike that of the Trump followers.

           

    “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day,” Fiala quoted Thomas Jefferson.  I love to quote Jefferson and often do, despite being chastised by the politically-correct foes of racism who apparently remind Fiala as well as myself of Jefferson’s ownership of slaves.  But enlightenment of people does not eliminate the source of tyranny and oppression, which as often comes from someone who considers himself (or herself) more enlightened than the people referred to above.  It might prepare them better to resist or eventually conquer tyrants and oppressors, but it certainly does not erase those evil spirits from our days.

           

     Four decades ago, when I was a 26-year-old student new to UC Berkeley (notably a land grant college,) I was escorted by an elderly, retired economics professor to the north side of the campus to read the inscription on the ag building, Hilgard Hall.  His name was Paul Taylor, and he’d devoted his life and his career to defending both the family farm and the rights of farm laborers, protecting the acreage limitation and residency provisions of federal reclamation law until they were decimated by enlightenment thinking and politics in 1992.  

           

     The inscription reads “To rescue for human society the native values of rural life,” a sentiment which bridges the leaking divide between two ways of knowing.  It is academic acknowledgement of the value of those who might not be seen as ‘enlightened.”  It is an intention, a statement of purpose and responsibility, not just a declaration of virtue.  

           

     It also expresses understanding of a potential danger – that human society might become torn from its sustaining roots – as well as indicating the tonic needed.  Forty years after reading the inscription, I still think it shows the way to become continent again.

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Trudy Wischemann is an agrarian advocate who is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.  Thanks to Jim Likins and Ronald Abee for their comments this week.  You can send your stories of rural life c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.