Disappointing News

Published in the April 20th, 2016 issue of the Foothills Sun-Gazette.

    The recent report from the Tulare County Grand Jury, “Nightmare in Lindsay,” was disappointing to almost everyone.   Unfortunately, the reporting about the report by our two major newspapers (the Porterville Recorder and the Foothills Sun-Gazette) was even more disappointing.           

     True to policy, the Grand Jury report did not reveal the complaint that triggered the investigation or the events that led up to the complaint being filed, much less the identities of those making the complaint.  A reader unfamiliar with Lindsay’s recent history would have no way to unravel the Grand Jury’s findings, whose roots stem back into the Townsend administration.  Good journalists would have provided that background.           

     During several Lindsay City Council meetings last year, some citizens who claimed to have signed the complaint spoke openly about it, including Brian Watkins, Ellen Blumer, and Kirk Ingoldsby (Councilwoman Kimball’s brother.)  The general tone of their testimony was threatening, and the goal appeared to be to get the three council members who had been named in the complaint (Mayor Padilla, Rosaena Sanchez and Steven Mecum) to either step down from their elected positions or tow the party line these citizens wanted.  These citizens are largely insiders in this community, as well as supporters of the previous administrations of Townsend and Wilkinson, support which extends to the current one under Bill Zigler’s management, i.e., the old guard of Lindsay.           

     Findings #3 and #4 related to this complaint: an allegation by these citizens that the Brown Act had been violated when 2 or 3 of the named councilmembers met privately with city employees over personnel matters.  Finding #3 was that no evidence was found of Brown Act violations; Finding #4 stated that some council members were involved in discussion of union issues “outside the parameters of established procedures,” without citing which procedures were stepped on.           

     The other three findings, however, which are a much bigger part of Lindsay’s nightmare, were caused by the Council prior to Sanchez and Mecum’s election and Padilla’s appointment as mayor: #1, the detrimental effects of combining the position of city manager with the director of public safety; #2, the costly employee settlements we suffered as a result of this decision; and #5, the cost of these settlements to the city’s already difficult financial situation.             

     Current councilmembers Danny Salinas and Pam Kimball, who were not named in the complaint but who sat on the previous council, bear a great deal of responsibility for these facts of our city life, as do former council members Steve Velasquez and Mayor Ed Murray.  Ramona Padilla was a newly appointed council member at that time, and also shoulders a portion of that responsibility. 

           

     Padilla was not on the Council, however, the last time it was investigated for violations of the Brown Act in 2010.  That time the Grand Jury found that violations HAD occurred when they met in San Jose and approved the merger of the police and fire departments into the department of public safety without proper public notice.  That was the beginning of Rich Wilkinson’s eventual rise to the joint position of City Manager/Director of Public Safety.  Pam Kimball negotiated that contract, which contained the extraordinary provisions requiring 4/5 majority approval for Wilkinson’s termination and 18 months’ severance pay, a factor that led to the extraordinary employee severance settlements that caused Lindsay’s budget to somersault.           

     The real news about Lindsay’s “nightmare” is that it is longstanding and ongoing, not likely to end until those insiders in power are curbed and made accountable.  Journalists have an important role to play in helping to keep public officials accountable.  Unfortunately the journalists covering Lindsay either do not understand that role or are ignorant of our history.  I hope both lackings can be corrected in the future.

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Trudy Wischemann is a Populist who writes.  You can send her your observations of insider “trading” c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

           

 

Tell the People

     “What shall I tell the people this week?” I asked my sweetheart as he left for work Monday.  “Oh, I don’t know,” he mused as he put his lunch bucket in the front seat.  “Tell them as long as Easter has come again and we have water in the reservoirs, there’s always room for optimism,” he said, buckling his seatbelt before driving off as the sun lighted a bank of clouds above the Sierra. 

           

     “Room for optimism” is a fine topic, especially in this election year like no other.  Since this man came into my life I have observed his many techniques for keeping the way clear for that positive state of mind, despite the fact that he stays informed about what is happening in the world.  Staying uninformed has been one of my ways of coping with the despair that frequently emerges in me when I read or hear the news.  This is only one of the ways in which he’s a good influence on me. 

           

     But “telling the people” is my calling, not his.  Since he came into my life I’ve had a chance to examine this activity otherwise known as “writing,” an act of verbally leaving the comforts of home to go out into our mental streets and call out to others, who may be sitting in their comforts of home, or may be out wandering those same mental streets, distressed at the news.  It is an act of starting an inaudible conversation, or trying to.  It is the hope of sending a thought out into the bewilderness to find another thought to hook up with, to mate or parry, or, sometimes, to trump.

           

     One day last week over breakfast I found myself talking with him about “our people.”  Both of our fathers worked hard for small pay, feeding large families.  That makes us working class by culture even if the collars of our occupations are not now blue, even if our training has taken us a little further away from dangers on the job and the physical wear and tear on our bodies that our fathers experienced.  His people were union Democrats; mine were anti-union Republicans, with some predictable differences in fellowship, epithets and voting.  My family wore “I Like Ike” buttons and waved little flags, while his cursed Eisenhower and prayed for a change in administration we did not get for a decade.  But in other ways our people had, and still have, much in common.

           

     One of the most apparent to me is that we are removed from the land.  Several in my parents’ generation kept trying to stay on or get back to the land, to make farming their livelihood, but failed.  By the mid-1980’s, when I started working with family farmers as an advocate, I calculated that I was fourth generation failed family farmer, not counting some remote cousins in Minnesota still on the land.  As I listened to the farmers talk about who failed and why, and what was needed to keep more farmers from failing and falling into the unfortunate category of working stiffs, I often sensed the insensitivity of this group to the needs of my people. 

           

     Unfortunately it echoed an equal insensitivity I’d experienced on the broad lawns, plazas and classrooms at both UC Berkeley and Davis.  “I have been defending working people since I went back to school,” I told my sweetheart over gluten-free Cheerios, amazed to be counting forty years of this relatively thankless work.

           

     In the media’s bewilderment over Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’ surprising popular support, I find a huge blindness to the workings of class.  It isn’t just that these folks are tired of the Establishment:  they’re tired of being invisible.  They’re tired of being denigrated for not having “risen” to some state of enlightenment that makes a three-car garage and a lawn service seem like necessities.  They’re tired of having their lives seen as unimportant.  They’re tired of having their realities unaddressed, of being taken advantage of and made worse by the ignorance of researchers and policy-makers alike.  They’re tired of having to share an ever-smaller pool of resources with an ever-larger number of people, and seeing no hope for change in that scenario.

           

     So, to my people this week I say “look twice.  Why would you trust a skizzilionairre to understand you any better than a Harvard grad?”  And to the rest of you, I say “Let us see if we can’t re-frame our understanding of the social divide these elections represent, and find a way to unite for the real good of the country.”  Because, you see, Easter did come again and there’s water in the reservoirs.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who sees the glass both half-full and half-empty.  You can send her your thoughts on the primaries c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Town and Country

    
     I have a small book written for children in my weird home library called Town and Country.  It was published in the early 1950’s as a social studies/human geography text designed to show the equivalence and interdependence of two kinds of life:  life in town and life in the country. 

           

     I love it for the time it represents and the sentiment; I keep it for the contrast with today.  We no longer have a sense of equivalence between those who make their living in offices and in barns; the sense that physical labor, which rural life has plenty of, is shameful reigns whether you live in town or country.  The word “rural” now connotes a level of poverty most people gladly shun, while “living in the country” connotes a level of wealth in which physical labor is shunned.  The sense of interdependence between town and country has been lost completely. 

           

     That point was driven home to me last week when I had the opportunity to drive to San Francisco and back in one day.  My friend Andrea Morris, who is an artist with a particularly moving exhibit on the role of art in recovery from the trauma of brain damage, needed to retrieve that exhibit where it had been on display at UC San Francisco, known for its medical teaching. 

           

     I drove to Merced, where she had once been the director of the Merced County Courthouse Museum in that beautiful old courthouse that looks like a capitol building lighted at night, then we streamed across the Valley at its widest, most expansive point through Los Banos and up the face of the dam at San Luis Reservoir.  Curving down through ravines and valleys on the reservoir’s west side, we dropped into Gilroy, then headed down the Santa Clara Valley to San Jose.  Taking 280 North, we climbed into the wooded hills of the Peninsula, skirting the heavily developed flatlands along the Bay, and arrived at the northwestern quarter of San Francisco relatively unscathed.

           

  “Oh, look at all the beautiful houses,” Andrea said, “I would love to live here.”  Her master’s degree in Art History was dedicated to the American Art Deco period, during which much of that city’s architecture was created.  We watched the people tread the sidewalks, jog the streets, bike in the lanes between cars and trolleys, and remembered a time in our lives when we might have been capable of keeping up with them.  We enjoyed the hospitality of the steward of the Alumni Faculty House where the exhibit was hung, and amicably put the images in their protective sleeves and boxes, then loaded them in my pickup just in time to vacate the parking space whose use expired at 4 p.m. for the commuter bus.

           

     As we retraced our route back down the peninsula, we came to have an appreciation for the beauty of our own valley, however.  “I wonder if anyone knows how many cars there are in this place,” Andrea mused, as we kept our place in the long winding lines of autos going both directions, often moving no faster than 10 mph.  For thirty, forty, fifty miles we followed the same cars, all trying to get out of the city, their occupational town, to arrive at their homes as close to the country as they can afford to get, if not the rural reality the country represents.  The road was still choked with cars past Gilroy, when we left the Santa Clara Valley to climb back over the hills toward our own.

           

     The night sky over State Route 152 was a bowl of stars, the land below dotted with a few lights of farmsteads and dairy barns, their light glimmering off the full canals and growing alfalfa fields, the barley nearing harvest.  The ancient, authentic Courthouse gleamed pure white as we pulled into her town; the waxing moon kept me company as I skimmed Hwy 99 heading  home to my own through orchards and fields, dotted by our small, workingclass towns born along the Southern Pacific tracks. 

           

     We both irrevocably knew we were home, despite the discrepancies.  But who now senses the interdependence of these two modes of living, much less the equivalency?

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes from her home in Lindsay.  You can send her your town and country thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Land Art

     What to write about this week?  What more newsworthy topic than our breathtaking citron hillslopes, or the way the clouds roll across the valley floor, then break against the Sierran spine?  The sight of snow coating those gray granite crags, bare so long that the newly white outlines against blue sky seem hopelessly romantic?

    

     You hear the wonder of it all spoken in some circles.  I myself don’t remember a year like this one, but this is only my 23^rd  spring in this region.  Early on in my tenure here I might have missed a wonder-full spring from lack of familiarity.

 

     A trip up Yokohl Valley would reveal glaciers of wildflowers cascading down ravines, gleeful cows and calves up to their shoulders in feed.  Mustard, filaree, fiddleneck, poppies, lupine, brodaiea, snow-in-the-mountains, monkeyflower in the creeks and rocky crevices – all those names just scratching the surface of what’s in bloom up there right now.  Down here on the valley floor so many plants are bursting forth in flower that allergy sufferers are turning indoors in droves.

     Juni Fisher gave a concert in Lindsay a couple of weeks ago, on Valentine’s Day Eve.  You might not see an immediate connection:  she does not sing about wildflowers or spring in particular.   She sings about love in general, wide-ranging love, from that between a man and a woman most people consider marginal (i.e., “Sideshow Romance”) to that between a girl and her horse (“Good Night, Good Pony.”)  But what makes my heart sing, listening to her, is where her art comes from.

 

     It comes from the land, from a culture that knows where its livelihood comes from and what’s required to keep it.  Whether singing about the historic vaquero way of horse training (“Silver Music”) or the modern life of raising, working and showing cutting horses (from “Listen,” through “Fillinick” and “Patrick” to “Ride with Your Heart Open,”) life on the land is the invisible partner.  None of this music would make sense in New York City.

 

     The day before Juni’s concert, I got a motorcycle ride up Yokohl Valley.  The wildflower opera was just beginning, the opening scene promising a standing ovation later.  All I could think was “I hope Paul Buxman is able to get out and paint right now.”  So I called him at lunchtime the next day, and the answer was “no.”  He’s farming two places while his brother-in-law tends his dying wife, doubling Paul’s spring tractor work, edging into dark at both ends of the day.  Yet his enthusiasm was as boundless as ever.

 

     “The agrarian life, Trudy,” he blurted, “is just so wonderful, isn’t it?  All the things in blossom right now in the rows, the smells of the grasses as I disk, the slight mastication reminding me of cow’s cud, the fragrance of the flowers – everything.  I popped all my blisters last night, my hands look just horrible, but it’s all just so wonderful….”  He stopped, uncharacteristically out of words for the joy he feels from his life on the land, this painter of our small farm landscapes whose renderings say more than 10,000 words ever could.

 

     We’ll have a chance to celebrate Paul’s land art next month in Visalia, and to join him in another work of land art: saving fellow agrarian Will Scott Jr,. whose wells have gone dry, from going out of business.  Helping a neighbor, “painting him out of a corner,” as Paul describes it, is an intrinsic part of land culture, embedded in our minds when we look at that scenery.  It still thrives where people are connected to land.

     Come join us in celebrating our land art at Paul’s gallery opening Friday, March 4^th at Arts Visalia, 214 E. Oak St. from 6-8 p.m.  The show will be up through Friday March 25^th.  The gallery is open Wed.-Sat. noon  to 5:30 p.m., where contributions for the Drill for Will project can be received and the Buxman  lithographs picked up in return.  Meanwhile, bask in the scenery!

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

Liberally Speaking

Liberally Speaking: Why Liberalism is Right for America, Stephen J. Natoli, Branden Books, 2015 

           

     Two weeks ago, at the monthly meeting of the Visalia Democrats, I was privileged to hear Stephen Natoli speak about his new book.  Professor Natoli teaches at history at COS, so his comments were particularly meaningful for the liberals living in Tulare County’s rather conservative environment.           

     I found I had a great deal in common with him.  We were both raised Republican, inheriting that political stance from our parents, who inherited it from theirs.  Four years behind me, he took that stance with him to college like I did, where it began to unravel under the influence of Nixon’s Waterloo, Watergate, and the illegal war in Laos and Cambodia, the “foolishness of the Vietnam War.”  

   

     That war was more than foolish for me:  when my brother came home in a body bag, my entire way of thinking was destroyed.  It took years to re-assemble some comprehendible ideas about how the world worked.  Like Natoli, however, I found some grounding in stories from the Great Depression and the civil rights movement.

     What’s different in our stories, however, is that Stephen Natoli went on to learn about the actual history of liberalism in this country and to analyze its precepts and successes.  He presents these beautifully and succinctly in Liberally Speaking.  “What I have learned from studying history is that the liberal approach works.  It’s not only a theoretical ideal; the record shows its practicality.  Liberal ideas have been the ones that have made society more just, more prosperous and better for people to live in,” ends the introduction.  He spends the rest of the book documenting that claim.

           

     What caused Natoli to write the book is quite interesting.  Visiting a Barnes and Noble bookstore in southern California, he noticed there was a plethora of books on the conservative and ultra-conservative positions, but few if any on the liberal creed.  He thought how seldom he had heard fellow liberals claim their position, much less express and defend the principles behind it, and ascribed Barack Obama’s 2 elections to the Presidency to Obama’s ability to express them eloquently.  “It was the beliefs themselves that won those elections by galvanizing the people behind their visions for the future.  That belief system,” Natoli says quietly, “is called liberalism.”

           

     Natoli’s list of “what liberals believe” is helpful and clarifying.  There are 17 inter-related principles:  ethics as the bedrock, founded in truth, honesty and love for one another; equality of all people at all times; freedom to be, do, say and believe as we will, as well as freedom from preventable harm; community of others whose well-being we must consider as well as our own;  opportunity to pursue our dreams; meeting human needs with compassion, ingenuity and resolve; democracy as the foundation for a just political system; empathy for our fellows as the wellspring of the causes we champion; progress, or faith in the improvement of the human condition if we work for it in good will; science as a means to discover and employ fact and reason to better our world; justice under the law and as a framework for fairness in society; security of our persons, rights and dignity; practicality in the ways we pursue our goals and implement our policies; diversity of people celebrated within the unity of the human family; civil rights enshrined and protected; service as the means to realize these principles; and love as the source of all the good we do and are.

           

     Conservatives may find themselves agreeing with some of these principles.  What distinguishes liberals is the willingness, heroic at times, to hold all these principles together.  “The American people deserve to see that liberal values are American values, and to appreciate that much of what has made America free and prosperous is a result of great liberal leaders and great liberal ideas,” Natoli declares.

           

     You can read more about the book and Natoli’s endeavors to get us liberals to talk at www.braveqnuwhirled.blogspot.com, as well as order the book there.  The book is also available at the Book Garden in Exeter.  Stephen Natoli will be speaking in Lindsay on March 9^th at the third Cultural Arts Forum, along with his colleague in the COS History Dept., Stephen Tootle, a Republican.  That evening they will be talking (not yelling) about the differences between the two parties. The event is free and begins with refreshments at 6:30 pm in the Lindsay Gallery and Museum on Gale Hill Ave. adjacent to City Hall.

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Trudy Wischemann is a book-reading, rural-writing liberal who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your political war stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Learning Curve

     Last week I wrote about the pending study session on goals, objectives and codes of conduct that the Lindsay City Council was preparing to undertake.  Despite my reservations, I attended that session and benefitted hugely, both personally and professionally.  Since I was the only member of the public or the press to attend, I’d like to tell you what I learned about leadership and our city council.

   

     I think it would be fair to say that the only real goal we worked on that day was learning to work together.  Finding the blockages to that goal became the unstated objective of the meeting.  Barry Sommers, the educational psychologist who facilitated it, had his work cut out for him, but he’d come with a very full and useful toolbox and years of practice working with governmental bodies, particularly school districts.  His eleven years working with Lindsay Unified (not to mention 27 years in Pixley) had him well prepared for that day.

     Dr. Sommers’ stated goal at the meeting’s beginning was to see if we could find pathways to becoming “an effective, cohesive council.”  Some of us bristled appropriately, because the word “cohesive” (again, shall we check the dictionary?) can be used to refer to an urge for uniformity that is common in small towns but undesirable in democratic governance. 

     Fortunately, Sommers understood that distinction and provided a definition of the primary job of a city council:  to decide which services will be provided and how to pay for them.  “Cohesiveness” then became a common commitment to respecting the process by which those decisions are made, not thinking alike.  “If everybody is thinking alike, somebody’s not thinking,” Sommers told us, quoting Gen. George Patton, that great military strategist whose decisions helped us win WWII.

           

     One of the blocks to cohesiveness is unmanaged, destructive conflict.  Sommer carefully unfolded differences between constructive conflict and its black sheep brother.  He defined conflict itself as “when at least one person is being blocked or perceives that someone is blocking them from getting what they want.”  Constructive conflict helps clarify issues, increases involvement, makes communication authentic, releases pent-up emotions, helps build group cohesiveness, and perhaps most important, solves problems.  Destructive conflict, on the other hand, diverts energy from real work, destroys morale, deepens differences between us, and produces violence.

   

     The “codes of conduct” we were intended to develop that day were actually the rules of engagement for managing conflict.  We worked for well over an hour to develop a working agreement on these rules of engagement, and the discussions we had about our differences on those rules helped clarify where some of the blockages have been in finding solutions.  The Council may find it more difficult to stick to those rules than they thought, but at least they provide a base line for progress.

     “Trust,” of course, is the most important element for moving from destructive to constructive conflict.  For the purpose of developing trust, Sommers had the council members tell each other their personal stories in two-minute sound bites, a tremendously effective technique for lowering guards.  We did not delve into the reasons for mistrust on this council, which are real, valid, and high-pitched on both sides; that discussion was tabled for another time.

     For me, however, the discussion of the role of trust was clarifying and encouraging in terms of what must be said in this column.  My purpose in writing it is much the same as some of the Council members’ purpose for serving:  helping Lindsay become a community where all residents can have a sense of belonging and a desire for participation. Where all residents can find themselves at home in this place.  Toward that end, we are all higher on the learning curve this week than we were the week before.  Thank you, Barry Sommers, for that.

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Trudy Wischemann is a homebody who writes.  You can send her your goals and objectives for Lindsay c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

On Privacy

    
    At last Tuesday’s meeting, the Lindsay City Council agreed to hire a consultant to direct a public workshop on defining the Council’s goals, objectives, and code of conduct.  I’m told the fee for this work is $1,000, which will come from the public’s coffer.  The time chosen was 10 a.m. Tuesday morning the 19^th, following the long weekend celebrating Martin Luther King Day.
    
    Councilman Mecum questioned the move on several counts, but perhaps the most important was the day and time chosen.  It gave little opportunity for real advance notice to the public, and the morning hour prevents most people who work from attending.  Although he was told the consultant was available only during normal business hours (which is hard for me to believe, frankly, unless this consultant does not normally work with governmental and NGO groups,) Councilwoman Pam Kimball also noted that the hour would allow for more privacy in their deliberations.
    
     It seems to me that a better use for a consultant’s fee would be a workshop on governmental transparency and the techniques available to increase public participation in this city’s affairs.  Despite years of writing on Lindsay’s crying need for improvement in this area, I see no recognition of that need from either Pam Kimball or Danny Salinas. Instead, from them we get only obscurement.  They like to keep their cards close to their chests.
    
     Perhaps a little trip to the dictionary will help.  Let’s look up “privacy” and see what it says:
            “1.  the quality or condition of being private; withdrawal from public view or company; seclusion.  

            2.  secrecy [told in strict privacy]

            3.  one’s private life or personal affairs [an invasion of one’s privacy].” 

           

     Since the first definition refers to the word “private,” let’s check there, too:  “belonging to oneself, not to the state.”  By number, the additional definitions expand on that:

            “1.  of, belonging to, or concerning a particular person or group; not common or general [private property, a private joke];

            2.  not open to, intended for, or controlled by the public [a private school];

            3.  for an individual person [a private room in a hospital];

            4.  not holding public office [a private citizen];

            5.  away from public view; secluded [a private dining room];

            6.  not publicly or generally known; secret; confidential;

            7.  carried out or done on an individual basis [a private medical practice];

            8.  engaged in work independent of institutions, organizations, agencies, etc. [private detective, private tutor].”  The dictionary had an additional entry on “private” relating to body parts, but I’ll leave that to the privacy of your imagination. 

           

     My dictionary’s old (it does not have an entry for “obscurement,” for instance, a brand new word I just made up,) but I think these definitions serve us quite well here in our small towns and rural countryside, where the word “postmodern” has very few users (thank God.) 

           

     Reading through these definitions, I think almost anyone could see that Mrs. Kimball’s hope for privacy in this public meeting would not have met with approval from Daniel Webster.  Nor would it have from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King Jr., and a host of other national leaders with democracy on their minds. 

           

     It’s time for the private citizens of this town to stand up and tell our so-called public leaders that we are tired of their private meetings, their anti-public attitudes and exclusionary tactics.  The President of the United States is not the only person we will be electing in November.  Think about your selection criteria for three Lindsay city councilmembers to be elected this fall, then start paying attention to who cares about them. 

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Trudy Wischemann is a Populist agrarian advocate who writes.  You can send her your thoughts on promoting public participation c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.