Not Now Dirt

Published August 16, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


            Saturday’s events in Charlottesville, VA are still news as I write this.  Most commentaries, appropriately, condemn the hate that fueled the protest over the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue.  There probably also was hate fueling some folks who came to protest the parading of hate-based beliefs in public, although I heard reports that their leaders, mostly people of faith, emphasized the need to resist hate with love.  Still, I admired them for standing up to the fascistic forces, knowing they were risking harm.  Adolph’s day is done.  There’ll be no revival of the brown shirts, not here, not on my watch.

            The proposed removal of the statue, like the lowering of the Confederate flag, is a final defeat to some, a final victory to others 150 years later.  But the angst over the removal of these signs of the South is more a product of their cultural evolution than attachments to bronze and cloth.  The shifts in demography and political power over that same century and a half are the result of the industrialization and urbanization that followed the defeat of slavery as an economic institution.

            In truth, rural people and places in the South have been decimated by the same economic-political forces that left people in Flint, Michigan drinking water from their contaminated river and too poor to protest.  They’re the same forces that have depopulated the rural Midwest, Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and yes, even rural California.  These forces have made laborers out of farmers around the globe and are now making welfare families out of laborers with high-tech robots.  The erosion of work for working people is silently killing us, while the triumphs of technology are trumpeted.

            In the name of that invisible reality, I brought a bucket of dirt into the sanctuary of Exeter United Methodist Church a week ago.  I’d hoped to create an epiphany that dirt is not profane, but sacred, and that those who work in dirt are people for whom we, as people of faith, should have concern.  Then we sang John Pitney’s cheerful song “Get Down and Get Dirty,” which goes: 

Get down and get dirty,

It’s the name of the game.

Get down and get dirty,

‘Cause we’re made from the same.

Yahweh sure got down and dirty

When He made us from the prairie;

The fact that we are not now dirt

Is only temporary.”

            Many of us have fear about speaking up in public or putting our bodies on the line in the face of hate.  Heather Heyer, the young woman killed by that neo-Nazi’s raging car, was frightened of going to the protest and went anyway.  But there are other forms of violence that need our attention, too.   May the rest of us who temporarily are not now dirt use our God-metered breaths in service to humanity and Creation.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can send her your dirt-working stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

Saving Towns

Published August 9, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “How was your sermon?” a friend asked Sunday afternoon.  I forgot that I wrote about it last week, but was pleased she remembered.

     

      “It went well,” I said.  “The people were beautiful.  They sang along with me and listened to every word.  I felt so encouraged by their responses….”  My friend grinned, hugged me with congratulations, and went on with her day.

     It was only after I got home that I realized why I felt so heartened.  “There might be some hope for our towns yet,” I thought, an epiphany about the sermon’s true purpose.

           

     For years I have described myself as a small-farm advocate.  The substance of the Gospel According to John Pitney is that the church has a right and a responsibility to care about the structure of agriculture and be involved in making it more sustainable and just.  This is true in California especially, since we lead the country in mega-farms and the requisite “innovations.”  Some of those innovations make it possible to feed more people from land that would normally feed only jackrabbits and rattlesnakes.  Some of those innovations steal markets from other regions where water is less scarce and climate less accommodating, however.

     Some of those innovations also steal jobs, livelihoods, even whole industries.  And where the damage is felt first, second and third is in our rural towns.

           

     I didn’t speak Sunday about my fears for our citrus belt towns.  I sense an earthquake coming as I watch farmhouses disappear and groves of navels being pushed and replanted to mandarins destined for the mega-packing facilities in Kern County.  As these farms are consolidated, the lands surrounding our towns are tended by mobile crews who move from parcel to parcel with no one supervising the work or being there to watch the results.  Fewer acres are being tended by people who live there year after year and know the wet spots, the cold spots, the average crop, the normal bug population or how things are varying this year from last.

     Then there’s the ongoing mechanization of the packinghouses, which is eliminating 75%- 90% of the jobs at each one.  In the past, the availability of winter work in citrus packing has made it possible for the laboring population to move up occupationally and become permanent residents, keeping their kids in school and becoming citizens.  What will towns like Lindsay do when they’re no longer incubators for immigrant stabilization and progress?  Lindsay’s city fathers and mothers bemoan the loss of our middle class, but it’s the working people who have kept us afloat so far.  When they leave, we’ll look more like empty Dust Bowl towns than orange-growing communities.

     Most of our town governments do not see the connection between agriculture and Main Street.  That’s unfortunate, but one role the people of faith could adopt is to bring these realities to their attention.  I look forward to singing and speaking more with you in the future.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a small farm/town advocate who writes.  You can send her your connectional thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Imagining Justice

Published August 2, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The good people of Exeter United Methodist Church celebrated Christmas last Sunday, July 30^th.  It was a beautiful service.  The bulletin bore a nativity scene on the cover, with shepherds and angels and wise men surrounding the holy family under the signal star.  We sang “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” and “Joy to the World.”  The children lighted a pint-sized Christmas tree, and in his sermon, Pastor Mark Smith excitedly ripped the ribbon and wrapping paper from a box, the forgotten present under the Christmas tree, the gift of faith.  “Be like little children with that gift,” he encouraged us, demonstrating the idea beautifully.

           

     I was grateful that I listened to my inner adult that morning and took myself to their church.  It was the perfect antidote to last week’s toxic news.  Between a truckload of dead immigrants from south of the border discovered in a Texas Walmart parking lot, the political MADness in Washington over healthcare, and North Korea’s ICBM, my faith account was overdrawn.  Being among people of faith celebrating their creation story was cleansing.

           

     I also learned that this coming Sunday, the 6^th  is the day I get to fill in for Mark, not the 13^th like I thought.  Although the fewer days for preparation might seem like an inconvenience, the timing couldn’t be better, because the message I want to bring is about the work of Christmas.  Now we can have Epiphany in August!

           

     My epiphany occurred back in April, a day or so before I ran into Rod Capps at RN Market.  “What are you up to these days?” he asked.  “I just discovered I want to preach the Gospel according to John – John Pitney,” I said boldly, surprised at the words that came out of my mouth.  “I have some pulpit vacancies I want to fill,” he said, getting out his calendar.  And here we are.

           

     Now, I’ve preached the Gospel of JP here in this column many times.  He’s the Methodist minister songwriter from Oregon whose body of work on land, the church, and the common good allowed me to see the faith dimension in my socio-economic research on agricultural communities.  His songs buttress me as I drive around our region, watching almonds replace stone fruit and vineyards, watching mandarins replace navels and valencias, watching small towns erode and small farms disappear.   They buttress me in my belief that we can find a better way to produce food and an economy,  a better relationship between ourselves and land which will produce more neighborly relations with others and fulfill our covenant with God.  They keep me imagining justice.

           

     And that’s the epiphany, really:  that there could be more justice in this world, and that the people of faith could be instrumental in bringing that about.  There could be more justice in our towns and our countryside, in our land relations and our politics.  And though the prospect seems daunting, claiming that truth begins with imagining.

           

     Come join us for Epiphany in August, Sunday the 6^th at 10:30 a.m.  All are welcome.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a small town researcher who writes – and prays.  You can send her your land epiphanies c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

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.

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

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.

 

pink glasses

Published in slightly edited form July 19, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There’s a commercial on television these days that I find particularly offensive.  It’s from the world of big-box optometry, and features an aggressive man dressed in a pink leotard and tutu mocking a ballerina, who lands in the middle of a middle-class living room and proceeds to ridicule a woman for wearing pink glasses. 
           
     In the living room, some women are discussing a book they are reading.  The condemned woman is trying to share her views on the book when she is rudely interrupted by the intrusive man (unfortunately not an unusual event in women’s lives.)

           

     He claims these other women can’t possibly take her ideas seriously because she’s wearing these pink glasses that SCREAM ---- and he doesn’t even have to explain why or what the glasses scream.  He simply has to claim that they do – and everything stops.

           

     Forget that the man looks ridiculous, and clearly has no room to point fingers.  What lacerates me is the reminder of the double-bind of femininity:  damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  But there’s a class message here, too, and that one brings me out to bat.

           

     The commercial is really aimed at those of us who think buying cheap reading glasses is an adequate solution to the problem of increasing fuzziness on the page.  They’re trying to convince us that we don’t have to take this embarrassing route.  For only $69 we, too, can have real glasses that SPEAK of economic well-being equivalent to people with health plans that include eye care, not scream our insurance-less bargain-basement survival strategies.

           

     Of course, if you’re paying good money for glasses, you’re not going to choose pink frames.  You’ll choose the standard silver or gold metal, or faux horn-rimmed, all of which imply a certain class or intellectual capability.  Those rims certainly will not distract anyone from anything.  They’ll make you fit right in.

           

     I remember when I bought my first pink glasses from Dollar Tree.  I already had several pairs of cheap readers in standard colors and shapes, the kind you’d wear in the presence of other people.  Then I found a pair of colorful paint-splattered white ones.  I wore them when I worked at RN Market, and people complimented them all the time.  When those broke, I replaced them with a plum-colored pair from Rite-Aid, since I had a little cash and they were on sale.  The compliments stopped, but I wore them anyway because they stayed on my head.

           

     But when I found the pink pair, and put them on my face, I felt just a little bit more feminine.  That’s a difficult place for me to stand some days because of cultural sentiments like the one in this commercial, but the glasses helped.

           

     I now have several pair.  Mostly I’ve worn them at home, but those days are over.  From now on you’ll see me in public with pink glasses perched on the top of my head if not on my face.  Take that, you wolf in women’s clothing.

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

Trudy Wischemann is an aging reader who writes in Lindsay.  You can send your views on rim colors to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 92347 or visit leave a comment below.

 

Summertime

Published July 12, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


    Summertime has arrived.  From now until Labor Day, we plow through the worst of our midday heat and the best of our mornings and evenings.  Everything grows abundantly with water and shrivels when water is withdrawn, including our children.  Our old people.  Our souls.

           

     I don’t hear that word without turning on the record player in my mind and hearing Bess sing “Summertime, when the living is easy.”  I’ve sung it myself a few times, mostly over the kitchen sink but once or twice before an audience.  I always find myself reaching for the meaning between the notes. 

           

     People not familiar with the musical “Porgy and Bess,” especially people right here in California’s sweltering breadbasket, might snort and say “Easy? Yeah, if you’re not a farmworker.”  But Bess is black, singing to an orphaned black infant cradled in her barren arms.  The chorus behind her and the community they represent, too, are black, poor, and obtain every scrap of food they eat by the labor of their hands.  They live tightly conscripted lives under white rule.  Nothing is easy.  Summertime is just easier: “Catfish are jumping, and the cotton is high….”

           

     Then Bess croons some fabrications to the baby, which puts the “easy living” idea in context.  “Oh, your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good lookin’,” she lies, comforting herself more than this tiny soul who has yet to speak its first word.  The truth is, Bess’s soul is rising to the occasion of this unplanned motherhood, expressing perhaps her first words of protective parental instinct.  “So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.”

           

     Then parental hope arrives.  “One of these mornings,” she projects, “you’re gonna rise up singing. You’re gonna spread your wings, and take to the sky.”  In one rendition I heard when I was growing up, this prospect brings Bess not only hope, but also a kind of terror that we hear in the singer’s voice.  What mother hasn’t freaked at the thought of her chicks fledging the nest?  And when the world outside Bess’s community is so incredibly hostile to people of her class and color, the natural fear is tinged with terror.

           

     These things come to mind, I think, because summertime for so many people is tinged with terror.  This summer could be worse than previous ones, not just due to climate change, but because we’ve become short-tempered with each other and politically hamstrung, and because some people in power think the way to deal with fear is to increase it.

           

     I’m glad I live here and not in New York or New Orleans, Chicago or Cleveland.  Grateful, last weekend we took a joy ride up to Three Rivers at sunset.  As we zig-zagged up the western slope of Rocky Hill, the Friant-Kern zig-zagged below, glimmering fluorescent orange against the dark groves, reflecting the polluted horizon.  This year, with its abundant water supply, summertime living is easy – for some.  Let us not forget the others.

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

Trudy Wischemann is an unromantic Western writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your sunny thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

 

Liberty & Justice

Published June 28, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Familiar words, “liberty and justice.”  Three of the last five words of the Pledge of Allegiance, spoken as we salute our flag, they ring true as national standards.  They are words worth fighting for, and fighting over.           

    

     As we move into the Fourth of July, we might think about these three words.  With red, white and blue flags billowing, fireworks replicating “bombs bursting in air,” and beer flowing like blood on the battlefields where our liberty, if not justice, was won, surely we can take a few minutes to ponder the reason for celebrating.

           

     Of these three words, I think we like “liberty” best.  It’s the one we defend most often when we send our boys (and now girls) off to war, their liberties seriously reduced the moment they don uniforms, where “liberty” means getting the weekend off.

    
     "Justice” is the word we have to fight to defend at home most of the time.  I think the question of justice is really what divides us as a country right now.  Injustices to people on both sides, long unaddressed, are what fuel the fires of dissension – and the belief that those on the other side have no interest in healing the wounds.  The concept of justice underlies our current health care battles, which seem to me like writhing snakes fighting to their deaths.

     But really, the most interesting word of the three is the conjunction “and.”  It’s not “or.” It’s not ambiguous.  “Liberty” and “justice” are conjoined; they belong together.  We can’t choose between them:  we need both.  One without the other is less than half; the promise of America is lost without holding the two together, no matter how difficult that holding may be.

  

     I’ve come to that understanding from the Quaker concept of truth and love.  Quakers believe that you have to hold those two things, “truth” and “love”, together or the promise of the faith is compromised. As one Friend, Muriel Bishop, has written “Truth without love is violence. And love without truth is sentimentality.  We do need both.”

           

     Freedom without justice means that some people are not free.  I can’t even imagine what justice without freedom might be, perhaps because I was born into a free country, luckier than most of the world’s population.  Most of us would defend to the death each person’s right to become a millionaire, but we balk when it comes to challenging some inordinately wealthy people on their unfair business practices or their abuses of labor.  We take that lying down, until the trampling mortifies our consciences.  Then the struggle begins.    

     Independence is worth celebrating, but liberty and justice take work.  On this 241^st birthday of our nation, let’s commit to making it a better year ahead.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a verbal freedom fighter who writes from her home in Lindsay.  You can send her your justice war stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.