Me vs. Us

Published July 18th, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Victor Davis Hanson, a right-wing historian and former Selma raisin grower, had a column in The Bee recently where he described the country’s current acidic division as a bad case of sour grapes on the part of the liberals, who just can’t seem to grow up and take their turn at not being in power. 

           

     Sitting on the left side of the chasm myself, of course I think it’s much more than that.  I think it’s what the folks on the other side of the chasm are doing with their power.   I think our collectively-left dismay, bordering on despair, comes from watching the progressive quilt we were patching together unravel, even dissolve, under the hands of the deregulatory wrecking ball.  It appears regressive to us, a turning backward fueled by the pain of those who lost power when the wheels of justice were required to turn, moving us forward as a country that promises social equality, and needs to become more economically sustainable.

           

     I think there’s another great sadness among many on both sides of the canyon: the devolution of our citizenship into Us and Them.  Actually, of course, we have been living with internal divisions for a very long time.  We small town rural people have resentments, often unspoken, toward the urban centers for their magnetic power of jobs and baubles that draw away our children and tax dollars.  Skin color and ethnic identities have long been used to identify whether we belong to Us or Them, even when we’re neighbors.  Efforts by those of us placed in the Them camp to remind the powerful Us that we, too, are Us have often been met with hostility and repression, even death.  So we’re actually quite used to the Us vs. Them equation, even if we’re not accustomed to feeling this much hatred (read “fear”) for being Blue or Red.

           

     But there’s a greater danger I think we all feel in our guts, whether we can put words to it or not.  It’s that somehow the national conversation is constantly being driven into an unhealthier set of categories:  Me vs. Us.

           

     It was something our head honcho said in Europe last week that triggered this thought.  He said “I have a very great relationship with Angela,” meaning Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, thought to be the most powerful leader currently in Europe.  And in that moment I saw the truth of a more general complaint about the current president of the United States.  He thinks it’s all about him, not us.  Not us, much less them.  Him.

           

     And what he’s encouraging, at least among his base, is a similar reversion to the notion that the individual is all that matters.  It’s a mythic notion our history writers have maximized –  you know, this country was built by brave, industrious, clever, ingenious (whatever) individuals, usually white men – leaving out the wives and children who also plowed the prairie, the phalanxes of slaves who planted and harvested the cotton, the immigrants who slaved in the fields for crusts of bread so that we might drink orange juice (or whatever) any time of the year.  You know, those guys.  I did this with my own hands, worked 20 hours a day….

           

     The problem this myth creates for the whole concept of community is beyond the scope of this column or even a 6,000-word piece for Vanity Fair.  But the biggest problem with “Me vs. Us” is what it does to the individual.  The word “us” includes “me,” so when we cut ourselves off from “us,” we’re slicing off part of ourselves.  It’s like having two hands, but no thumbs.  Sure, you’ve still got 80% of your fingers, but that missing 20% makes all the difference in the world.

           

     I’m not saying it’s simple, but let’s not let ourselves become divided along these lines.  We need to work for us, not just me.

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Trudy Wischemann is a community researcher who writes.  You can send her your “me vs. us” dilemmas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Want Not

Published July 11, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Waste not, want not,” is an old, old saying dating back to the 1700’s and before.  It is an essentially conserving concept:  if you are careful not to waste things, you’ll have greater abundance in this world.

       

     Last week a representative from Mid-Valley Waste gave a presentation to the Lindsay City Council about the measures that company is undertaking to reduce our city’s waste levels and decrease contamination of the recyclable portion.  Some of those measures include increased surveillance of our garbage cans, with increased penalties for improperly sorted garbage, recycleables, and green waste.  Some are more educational, like the kiosk at city hall for pamphlets describing the proper place for these items we want or need to throw away.

           

     There appears to be a change coming, however, in what can be recycled thanks to the imbalance of U.S. trade with China.  One of the things we export to China is our recyclable garbage, which only slightly offsets the huge amount of things we import from them.  In retaliation for the tariffs recently imposed by our country on theirs, China has stopped buying our recyclable garbage.

           

     Because of this, suddenly the only plastic items we can throw in our blue cans are those marked with the number “2” on the bottom.  “We can’t take 3 through 7 anymore,” the Mid-Valley Waste representative said.  I wondered silently when they were going to tell us and how.  I wonder how many people check the number anyway, or remember that only certain numbers qualify, since I know that I myself have become lax in that.

           

     It’s been less than a week since I heard the presentation, but my garbage sorting habits changed instantly.  Now, aware that a $50 fine could result, I find myself returning to the safer side, saving only the most obvious recyclable items like newspapers, empty cat food cans and milk jugs for the blue can.  I toss everything else in the brown can.  What the trade imbalance with China will mean for our local landfill problems is suddenly vivid, and most certainly was not anticipated by anyone in Washington, D.C.

           

     As I sorted, I also realized how much of the garbage we toss is packaging material that comes wrapped around the articles we buy from China.  That this waste material was twice traversing the Pacific Ocean was mind boggling itself, a total violation of the whole idea behind recycling, which is increased sustainability.  There’s nothing sustainable about using fossil fuels to ship garbage back and forth across the world’s largest ocean.  Of course, there’s nothing truly sustainable about buying widgets and toasters and a billion other little interlocking consumerist parts from that far away, either.

           

     I think there may be better ways to encourage our residents to learn to sort garbage into salvageable, compostable, hazardous and buriable portions than what is currently being done.  But one way we might want to try is the “reduce” approach: to buy less trash in the first place. In fact, it might be time to reverse the old maxim: “Want not, waste not.”  For us, the leading consumers of the world, it might be a useful phrase.

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Trudy Wischemann is a long-time recycler who also writes.  You can send your thoughts on garbage and its economic roots to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Unafraid

Published June 27, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This past Sunday, Mark Smith, the Methodist pastor who has served both Exeter and Lindsay congregations, preached his last sermon.  He called it “Unafraid,” and used texts from both the Old and New Testaments to bring home the primary message of the Bible:  that God is in charge and we, the people, should fear not.

           

     His message was more than comforting.  It was, and is, also a challenge, because we use fear to keep us comfortable.  “I can’t do that,” we tell ourselves, whatever “that” is, “because ____,” and then fill in the blank with some reason or excuse to cover the fact that, in truth, it’s because we fear the possible consequences.

           

     Of course, we in the pews as well as behind the pulpit have had reasons for little bouts of fear since we all heard the Methodist Conference’s decision to transfer Mark to two churches in Amador County.  Moving a family and facing new congregations teamed up with finding a new pastor who will preach messages we can hear (and who knows what else?) have made people on both sides of the aisle uncertain.  Our new minister and his family are from the tiny South Pacific island of Tonga, where things are very different than here.  But God’s in charge.  We move forward and be grateful.

           

     As I listened to Mark’s sermon (twice, needing a double dose,) I wished we could apply this message to our current national conundrums around immigration, international trade, the budget, even the elections.  Stirring up fear has been this administration’s primary tool for generating votes and legislation, not to mention executive orders.  The fears being stirred are in us, however.  We are responsible for having become a fearful people.

           

     “Oh, I’m not afraid,” I hear you protest in my mind.  Yes, we have things we use to protect ourselves:  laws and regulations, firearms and fences, locks and alarms, police and the military (and of course there’s always location, location, location.)  If we’re not afraid, then what is the uproar over illegal immigration, or school shootings, or the trade deficit with China?  Or North Korea’s challenge to our nuclear military capability?  Or even the possible elimination of Medicare and Social Security?  It’s fear, folks:  fear that our comforts, our support systems, our way(s) of life will be changed or disappear, replaced with something different, less, or eliminated completely.  It’s no small thing.  Even the small things.

           

     “When did we vote for this?” a friend’s friend is reported to have said when the Lindsay Public Golf Course began to be dismantled.  I could tell him it’s when we voted (or didn’t) for the current city council members; I could tell him it’s when they voted at a city council meeting which he had the right (unexercised) to attend and to speak against the proposal.  But when I have invited people to join me in the council chambers, most often they look away, check their schedules, mention how inconvenient it would be to come.  Sometimes they confess they wouldn’t want to say anything for fear of looking foolish, or out of step with people they admire (or fear), or possibly for generating consequences that might make their lives more difficult.

           

     It occurs to me that perhaps we have become a fearful people because we’re afraid, mostly, of fear.  It’s uncomfortable:  easier to hide from it than meet it head-on.  Perhaps that’s where God works first: in removing the fear of fear, releasing us from being frozen in the headlights to meeting the sources of possible danger face to face.  It’s an interesting proposition we might explore – as a people.

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Trudy Wischemann is an unmethodical person who writes regularly anyway.  You can send her your thoughts on fear c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Separation Anxiety

Published in somewhat edited form June 20, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I have just watched online a CNN  interview with John Moore, the Getty photographer who took the photograph that went viral over the weekend of a wailing two-year-old on the ground near the border.  She's a little Honduran girl in hot pink shirt and shoes, black pants; her mother had just put her down,  obeying the orders of a border patrol guard who was about to begin a body search.

           

     Moore said the mother, who’d just spent a month crossing Mexico, did not know what was coming.  She did not know what was going to happen to her, much less that her daughter, who she’d carried the whole trip, would be taken from her person.  She had no idea that her daughter would be taken to some unknown place where she would not be able to protect her child, much less know if she was safe.  But the photographer knew, and the separation anxiety he witnessed in the little girl set off separation anxiety in him and magnified it 100 times.

           

     Although the tears he captured on film were a normal two-year-old’s reaction to uncertainty, I think they represent what we all are feeling after learning what we’re doing at the border.  “The families there had no idea they were about to be separated from their children,” he said.  “I could tell they weren’t up on the recent news, they’ve been traveling in difficult conditions.  But I knew what was going to happen next.  And for me to take these pictures, scenes that I’d seen before but with the knowledge that these parents and their children would soon be in separate detention facilities – made it hard for me personally as a journalist, as a human being, and especially as a father.”  Then he added, just as the interview ended, “on Father’s Day.”

           

     That tail-end comment brought me close to understanding something my father always said about never losing your concern for your children.  John Moore, the photographer, is silver-haired; his children are likely out of the nest at least and safely on their own journey.  But for many people, the desire to protect and provide never leaves.  Those feelings of responsibility are extended when the events of childhood and child-raising leave scars on one or both sides of the equation.

     Many professionals, like Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Association of Pediatrics, have expressed concern for the long-term impacts on the children from this separation from their parents.  But I have tremendous fear also for the parents, and not only what they’re feeling now, but will feel about themselves in the future.  Some of these families will get through this, roughed up but intact.  Some of them won’t.

           

     Do any of you remember the film “Sophie’s Choice?”  In it, the Nazis forced Meryl Streep’s character to decide which child to keep with her, her son or her daughter, with the unchosen child to be taken away by the tyrants.  The scene has never left my body; I can still see her standing in line, paralyzed, traumatized.  My mind has blocked out which child she chose, but not her only recourse for  having made the decision, which was suicide.  The “choice” forced upon her was deliberately inhuman.   I think what we're doing to these families is, too. 

           

     This administration’s action is not a question of enforcing the laws.  It’s trying to force the country’s already-divided politicians into a frenetic free-for-all, while Donald Trump stands aside, watching gleefully at the mayhem he’s created.  The immigrant families are merely hostages of yet another malevolent scheme to make DT look effective.  But now we’re hostages, too, those of us brought to tears by the stories of family separations.  I think what we’re grieving is the breaking of the parent-child bond.  Let us use our empathetic grief to change this policy.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send your thoughts to her at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Be sure to read "When ICE Comes" as well  from two weeks ago.

 

The Missing Trees

Published June 13, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” was running through my head as I sat down to write this column.  I think it was being broadcast telepathically from the Lindsay Olive Bowl, our historic sports complex that hosted adult baseball teams in the past as well as youths’, and high school football games as well.  The olive-shaped scoreboard, donated by Lindsay High School Students and Lindsay Ripe Olive Company, still has places to record the downs and quarters as well as the runs and innings.  Going there, even when it is empty of people, provides an experience of continuity, being part of Lindsay’s past better days as well as the better ones we hope will come.

           

     But if you’ve been following the plans for Lindsay with even a half-open eye, you’ll know they’re not coming soon.  We have at least two strikes against us, if not three:  the half-baked plans put forward by staff and the lack of critical questioning and oversight of those plans by the council.  The third strike is we, the people, who do not believe we can influence this process and just stay out of it.

           

     I think the reason the Olive Bowl was singing to me is the memory of the missing trees at the Lindsay Public Golf Course, which was closed in February to prepare for its renovation into soccer fields.  The grant money that had been secured to renovate the Olive Bowl was moved from that purpose to the purpose of demolishing the golf course in order to build five new soccer fields (at the proposal of staff, the approval of Council, and the excitement of the youth soccer teams who stood to benefit from these new fields.)  The coaches of the baseball teams got the word a little late, and so were not able to muster their youthful players to be at the council meeting where this approval occurred.

           

     The reason given for this money-shifting was that the Olive Bowl’s renovation plans had been stymied by the death of the engineer in charge, and with the non-extendable deadline of June 30 for the expenditure of these funds, the money would be rescued from potential loss by diverting them to this more easily completed project.

           

     Since February I have been watching the golf course with an anxious eye, hoping for a reprieve.  Even as the grass grew long this spring, golfers were going out and hitting balls in the rough, so to speak.  The leaves on the trees returned, and the landscape moved from being a well-trimmed park to a sortof nature preserve, still lovely, green-treed open space.

           

     Then the grass turned yellow, and sometime in late May while I was travelling, they cut the trees.  They didn’t cut them down, mind you:  they just beheaded them, cut off all their limbs, and left 10’ tall stumps standing bare-naked in the sun.  It looks brutal to me.

           

     And now there are less than three weeks to go before that money has to be spent to make soccer fields for all those excited youth.  When the kids thought of having soccer fields there, did they imagine the trees remaining to provide shade for the parents on the sidelines?  Did the coaches realize the city intended to turn a simple paradise into yet another shadeless desert in summer?  Did any of us?

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Trudy Wischemann is a pained tree-hugger who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

           

When ICE Comes

Published June 6, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There is a beautiful, tall row of corn growing in the back yard of the house next door to mine where once there was a dense hedge of pyracantha, commonly known as the Firethorn bush.  Although the cedar waxwings undoubtedly miss the red berries in winter on both sides of their north-south migration, my neighbors will be eating from their little piece of land this year, something I admire.

           

     Changes in vegetation are only one of the differences in my neighborhood since I first moved here.  Once there were workers and managers at Lindsay Olive, an ag chemist, the owner of the Chevron station, and a farm labor contractor whose crews served the nearby Sunkist packinghouse.  Now I don’t know where anyone works or where they’re from, a reflection of my reclusive nature and their commute schedules.  Our language differences add a small complication to the non-local nature of our lives.

           

     I imagine that’s not too different from many neighborhoods in our small towns now.  I don’t know the citizenship status of my neighbors, and I certainly wouldn’t ask, out of politeness.  They’re my neighbors, and I keep looking for ways to act accordingly despite my ignorance of their lives.  But since the March 13^th  meeting of the Lindsay City Council, when the Council was approached by activated citizens seeking official support for DACA students (which the Council gave,) I have been wondering what I would do if ICE showed up at my neighbors’ doors.

           

     In Germany during WWII, when their government’s agents known as Brown Shirts came to take away Jewish neighbors, the non-Jewish neighbors had two responses.  One was to hide behind the curtains and watch, assuming the government knew what it was doing or remaining silent, simply too afraid to make a peep.  The other, much riskier, was to take their Jewish neighbors into their homes and hide them.  With 20/20 hindsight, we have become judgmental about the curtain-watchers, but are blind to the fact that here in good old America there are no stories about families taking in their Japanese neighbors when they were being rounded up by our government officials and taken away to internment camps.

           

     Mark Smith, pastor of both the Exeter and Lindsay Methodist Churches, was at the March 13^th Lindsay City Council meeting, where we met organizers from CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights (Los Angeles.)  CHIRLA has a new office in Porterville, and the organizers were eager to find ways of serving the community. 

           

     Wanting to know what we can do to help, we met with them and decided to sponsor one of their workshops on immigrants’ rights.  This workshop will be held at Lindsay United Methodist Church’s Maxwell Hall on Sunday, June 10^th at 5:30 p.m.  It will be conducted primarily in Spanish to serve those residents, documented and undocumented, who could benefit from knowing what to do if and when ICE comes to their door.  We hope to begin the process of learning what the rest of us might do as well.  Please join us if you can, and watch this column for further developments.

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Trudy Wischemann is co-editor of the forthcoming volume A Little Piece of Land:  Writings on Agriculture and the Common Good in California.  You can send her your thoughts on ICE incursions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

           

Westlands' Fake Tears

Published in slightly edited form May 30, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     When I travel north, I normally take Highway 99.  It keeps me in touch with our neighbors: the smaller communities like ours based in nuts, tree fruit, vines and field crops rather than the Mediterranean orchards of citrus and olives.  Of course, it also exposes me to the latest developments around our cities, sometimes a rude awakening.

           

     But lately I’ve had reasons to swing over to I-5 instead, which I used to avoid for its barrenness and lack of human settlement.  It took me a little time to realize that the stretch of I-5 from Highway 198 north to Highway 152, which (heading west) circumnavigates San Luis Reservoir through Pacheco Pass and drops us into the verdant Santa Clara Valley -- that entire stretch of I-5 traverses the only a portion of the Westlands Water District's west side.

           

     I was surprised by the amount of green along that route.  Vast plantings of almond trees line the road where tumbleweeds used to grow until they became uprooted and bounced along the highway.  In small triangles of unused or unusable land, the previous landscape was evident, with a few groves of dead tree stumps remaining from the drought.  In those unirrigated triangles were signs that read “Congress Created Dust Bowl.”

           

    I almost expected to see skulls of dead cattle and abandoned Model A’s nearby, but the signs were really a form of rural street theater. Something for the news photographers to focus on, after interviewing a solemn farmer who’d just bulldozed his old, beloved almond grove.  But the sense of increased greenery made me wonder how many trees were really lost.  I decided to investigate. 

     By going to the Westlands Water District website, it is possible to examine the crop reports for every year since 2000.  In those years, the number of acres planted in almonds has tripled, from 29,178 to 87,882.  There was only one year with slightly fewer acres of almonds harvested than the year before (2017 saw 30 less acres harvested than 2016.)  Acres of harvested pistachios saw an even greater per cent increase, from 5,131 acres in 2000 to 44,103 acres in 2017.  Other permanent plantings almost tripled in that same time period, from 21,381 acres to 60,211.  More than half of that 60,211 acres are trees and vines that in 2017 had not yet come into production.

           

     What this means for us, the taxpayers, is that we will be begged 2.6 times more and harder to send taxpayer-supported, taxpayer-developed water in short supply to a district intended to receive supplemental water supplies only.  With their political power Westlands will continue to get from Congress the concessions they need to keep water flowing their way, with or without new dam construction.  Their few, large landowners will export those easy-shipping nuts to China or wherever, and reap what we’ve sown with water needed elsewhere.

           

     Methinks we need some signs along I-5 that read “Congress Created Boondoggle” on those miles of green almond orchards.

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Trudy Wischemann is an old-timey researcher who still uses paper and pen to line up her columns of numbers.  You can send her your I-5 sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.