Town and Field

Published Oct. 5, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the second report from Reedley, where the Reedley Peace Center at First Mennonite Church is sponsoring a public speakers series called “In the Struggle.”  The speakers are presenting information about past and present attempts to promote a better agricultural system in this valley, and will conclude with prospects for the future.
 

     The second speaker in our series (Friday, Sept. 30,) was Dan O’Connell, whose doctoral dissertation forms the core of the series. His research covered the public contributions of 6 California scholars who examined the social, economic and political costs of our industrialized agricultural system.  Friday night he discussed three of those scholars, now deceased:  Paul S. Taylor, Walter R. Goldschmidt, and Ernesto Galarza.

           

     Paul Taylor, professor of economics at UC Berkeley, began his academic career researching farm labor, and ended it documenting the ways agribusiness giants prevented the enforcement of the acreage limitation and residency provisions of federal reclamation law.  He also advocated for enforcement of the law and worked politically to prevent its demise.  He supported research efforts demonstrating the importance of the acreage limitation, such as the studies documenting the community development impacts of large-scale farms and the positive contributions of small-scale farm cooperatives.  He also supported non-profit groups such as Fresno’s National Land for People, led by George Ballis and individuals like Ben Yellen, M.D. in Imperial Valley, who were working politically and through the courts to get the law enforced.

     Paul’s early efforts documenting Mexican farm labor in Imperial Valley (1920’s) transitioned to documenting the in-migration of Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930’s.  Like their Mexican predecessors, the Okies were former farmers-turned-farm laborers when they were swept off the land.  With his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange, Taylor documented the terrible conditions of these refugees and then helped create government labor camps and resettlement programs to begin to alleviate these conditions.

     Paul’s work in the field of farm labor was followed by the heroic efforts of Ernesto Galarza, who documented the Bracero Program and worked to organize a union for farm laborers.  Through this work Galarza recognized first-hand that the Bracero Program, which was begun during WWII to provide Mexican farm laborers for California’s farms while Americans were away at war or occupied in the arms factories, was being use to prevent union organizing efforts from succeeding.  Galarza’s efforts to create a union failed, but he succeeded in bringing the Bracero Program to an end in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of WWII.  Shortly thereafter, the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta began, as well as efforts to provide the legislation needed to make union protection of farm workers possible in this state.

 

     Paul Taylor’s research on farm laborers, Mexican and Okie alike, took him to his work on the acreage limitation provisions, which, if enforced, could have provided the doorway for those laborers to return to their real occupation as farmers.  During the battles in Congress to authorize and make appropriations for the Central Valley Project, which California’s large farmers claimed should be exempt from the acreage limitation provisions, he helped construct and then supervised the examination of the effect of farm size on rural communities, which became known as the Arvin-Dinuba Study.  The study was conducted by a young anthropologist, Walter Goldschmidt, who determined that small farms created communities that were much healthier economically, socially and politically than the towns surrounded by large-scale (and often absentee) farm operations.   Goldschmidt, whose career as an anthropologist included studies of multiple indigenous tribes and cultures on three continents, was called back to testify at Congressional hearings on the results of this study from the beginning of his career until a few years before his death at age 96.

     What we see, looking at the active, engaged scholarly careers of Taylor, Goldschmidt and Galarza, is that the hidden impacts of our industrialized agricultural system cover the entire range of concerns in this valley, from the development of the towns to the conditions in the fields and back into the towns again.  In the next two talks, we will see how other scholars have continued this work, from Don Villarejo’s research to document the increasing agricultural concentration of power and wealth and farmworker advocacy (Oct. 7^th) to Dean MacCannell’s extension of Goldschmidt’s community research at the macrosocial level, examining the influence of farm size on 70 San Joaquin Valley towns (Oct. 14^th.) 

     Come join us. For more information on the series, visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on “calendar.”

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher and advocate who writes.  You can read last week’s column below.  Many thanks to Chris Brewer for his lifelong devotion to the history of our region.

Report from Reedley

Published Sept. 28, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


For the next few weeks I will be reporting on a speakers’ series called “In the Struggle” being held at the Reedley Peace Center, a program of the First Mennonite Church.  The idea for the series came from the Cornell dissertation of Dan O’Connell, who served as Sequoia Riverlands Trusts’ conservation easement officer in Visalia.  He transferred to a similar position with American Farmland Trust, working out of Fresno where he also helped start Food Commons, a non-profit linking small producers with local consumers.  Dan’s dissertation portrays the contributions of a handful of California college professors who, despite the resistance of their academic institutions, lack of research funds, and political opposition, documented the need for a more sustainable agricultural system in this state. The series goes beyond academic contributions and includes some of those workers in that field today.
 

     We drove to Reedley on the first cool Friday night of fall, through the clouds of dust from walnut harvesting, past vineyards with stacks of brown paper sheaves at the ends of the rows, ready to make raisins from grapes.  The evening light reflected lightly off water in furrows between rows of trees getting their last drink, through the fine mist of sprinklers running, the produce of our lands looking secure despite the drought.

           

     The peacefulness of the scenery contrasted with the subject of the presentation we were headed to hear: the struggle over the past 80 years to make sense out of the great contradiction we live with in this Valley, that we are the most agriculturally productive region of the world with the nation’s highest rates of poverty.  In many places, among many people in this precious valley of ours, just speaking that contradiction will either clear the room or provoke hostility. Yet we live with its consequences daily, whether we consciously recognize it or not.

           

     The first speaker in this series was from Cornell University, Dr. Scott Peters who served on Dan’s dissertation committee.  His field is history, with expertise in the public mandates of the land grant colleges, which range from Ithaca, NY where he teaches to the west coast locations of UC Berkeley and Davis.  We learned a great deal about the development of these institutions and the men (largely) who shaped them.  His understanding about the evolution of education in this country was mind-opening.

           

     But it was his understanding of the different types of history that helped me most.  Historical narratives, he called them, the storylines that lead our thinking, the storylines that shape our lives as individuals and communities.  He began with his own story, a son of two people who grew up on small farms.  That’s a critical thread we hear in many lives: how many generations you have to go back to get to the ancestors who farmed.  Many in this valley don’t have to go back.  I have friends who farm on small portions of land.  Our best Valley writers can still taste the peaches they raise or feel the handle of the hoe their grandfather used to run furrows and chop weeds.

           

     According to Dr. Peters, the first kind of history we write is the heroic one, the one where only good comes from human efforts.  We came, we ploughed, we dug, we built.  See what we accomplished.

           

     The second kind (he called the counter narrative) responds to the omissions in the first.  Yes, we came, and we took, we trampled, we depleted, we abused, and then we reinforced the pattern so that it takes an act of Congress (or God)  to change.  See what damages we have wrought in our fervor to build.

           

     The third kind Dr. Peters named as “prophetic,” and it is the one I identify as my own part of this history-making.  What could it have been like if we’d done it differently, and what can that imagination tell us about how to proceed? 

           

     In my own history in this struggle, following Paul Taylor’s indomitable lead, carrying his baton, the question is this.  What if we had enforced the acreage limitation of federal reclamation law on the Central Valley Project, not to mention the Kings-Kern Army Corp dams and the State Water Project?  What if we could now find some way to revoke the power we’ve given those large landowners far too long by delivering them water courtesy of the pubic treasury and the rightful, common claim we all hold to that resource?

           

     Join us for these discussions at the Reedley Peace Center.  Visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on “Calendar” for the speakers schedule and descriptions or call (559) 994-4297.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can contact her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Sticks and Stones

Published Sept. 21, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I walked into the post office the other day to pick up my mail and received a new bile aperture in the process, which some of you doubtless think I deserve.

           

     “I’ve been reading your articles,” the younger woman started carefully, realizing she’d just been handed the opportunity she’d been dreaming of:  telling me face to face what she thought.  It turns out she’s a Trump supporter and was offended by my anti-Trump sentiments being expressed in print.  "I don’t think you should say those things in the paper.” she continued.  “Everyone knows you're a liberal already.  You don’t have the right.”

           

     She grew angry as she developed her argument, and shaky as a result.  I could empathize, since the same thing happens to me when I suddenly have the opportunity to express my discontent to the person I think is causing it.  As we left the post office, she ended her testimony with a string of expletives about the presidential candidate she assumes I am supporting, all unprintable even as a quotation.  As we parted, she told me her name, which I think was Patricia, although, to be honest, her name disappeared as I digested what she had spoken.

           

     People are entitled to their opinions.  People are entitled to express their opinions in print, so long as they are identified as opinions and not a news article or a factual report.  There are other limiting criteria as well, like profanity and libel, for instance.  But as long as the speaker/writer claims his/her words as their opinion, the hearer/reader can keep opinion separate from fact.  The airwaves are kept free, and it maintains equality in a way:  each of us is entitled.

           

     Equality can be damaged by the presentation of opinion as fact:  it sets up a kind of authority that is unearned.  Reporters and even researchers sometimes slip their opinions into so-called factual writings, and detecting those becomes the art of critical thinking.  It is a painful art to practice because it leaves a person at odds with the promoters of these “facts,” as well as those who have bought into them as truth.  But without critical thinking we are simply sheep on the way to being shorn.

     Which brings me to the subject of name-calling.  I don’t know if kids these days still hurl this little saying around the playground, but when I was young we truly believed the rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”  On the east coast or in previous generations, they might have said “harm me,” but we used the word “hurt.”  The truth is, that was a lie.  Being called a name over and over again, especially a name that demeans, can cause long-lasting harm which can take decades to mend, far longer than it takes bones.

     And that’s what I’ve got against your candidate, Patricia.  He name-calls.  He name-calls over and over again until people start to believe it because nobody’s made him stop.  It’s libelous, what he’s done with “Crooked Hillary” and all the other disparaging names he made up for his Republican rivals.  It’s also juvenile.  It reflects an unwillingness to debate the facts, which he also avoids by spouting “facts” that he’s made up just for the fun of watching otherwise serious people scramble to identify the false portions of his half-truths, the most serious one being the promise that he’s on your side.

     It’s a con job, friend.  If you-all elect him, it’s going to be a rude awakening and a serious disappointment when his policies take you to the cleaners along with the rest of the country, while his rich friends (and himself) get richer.

           

     In my never-very-humble opinion (and that I admit,) Donald Trump is a name-caller.  And in order not to get hurt in this election, we’ve got to remember what we learned on the playground:  how to avoid being hurt by name-callers.  The lesson is simple in principle, but difficult in practice:  don’t listen. 

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural resident writer who still has to practice what she preaches.  Thanks to Patricia for speaking to me directly.  You can send your anti-name-caller experiences c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

little luxuries

Published September 14, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last week I stopped in at one of my favorite cheap chain stores, the kind where nothing is over one dollar.  I try to keep my purchases there to a minimum, but when I need a little freehanded spending, the kind that makes me feel like I really do belong in American society, it’s the place to go.  That’s where I find the little luxuries that add spice to my life without making it impossible to pay my water bill.

           

     One of the things I brought home from that little splurge was a jar of raspberry jam.  It was a squared-off jar like some of the classy imported jams arrive in, holding 12 oz. of deep ruby red fruit, with the words “world class” and “premium product” on the label.  The label, when I finally got around to reading its backside over my first cup of coffee the next morning, also informed me that it was a product of Egypt, imported indeed.

    

     And that’s when the shame moved in.  One dollar American paid for a glass jar with a metal lid, raspberries, sugar, and pectin; it paid for the energy and labor for processing, and even more for shipping half-way around the world.  What could the Egyptian berry farmers have received for their fruit in this product, or the sugar producers?  The jar manufacturers, the jam makers, the longshoremen loading cases of jam aboard ships?

           

     And what American product did my purchase displace?  The fine jam makers in Fresno County may get $2.50 or $3.00 for their jars of jam produced only an hour away.  Why would I not pay $2.00 more for this little luxury to keep my neighbors in business, reduce (or at least not contribute to increased) greenhouse gases, global warming, pollution of the oceans?  I didn’t even need a new jar of jam:  I found two in the cupboard when I got home.

            And this is the issue I tripped over as I girded up once again to protest the proposed location of a new Dollar General store in Lindsay:  I’m up against the wall of my own buying behaviors.  I know what it could mean to Lindsay’s buying public to have something like a general store back in town, especially one with discount prices where you can snag little luxuries for yourself with the justification of getting a real bargain.  How many of us in our now-not-so-prosperous town can afford to pay full price for things, at least in our minds?  And if it eventually drives stores out of town with higher prices for the same goods made in China or Thailand or even Egypt, like Rite Aid or Art Serna’s hardware store, can we ourselves be blamed?  We only bought one little jar of raspberry jam for ourselves.  Each one of us cannot bear the responsibility for a marketing system gone mad through global trading.  Heck, at least the raspberry growers in Egypt made something instead of nothing in this transaction.

      In many ways the race is already lost, at least for the moment.  Those of us who would, if we could, vote anti-trade in November’s election in honor of the jobs lost to foreign countries in years past, will be standing in line on Dollar General’s opening day, waiting to dive in for the bargains from this globalized fact of life.  I will have eaten all my raspberry jam and begun to save thumb tacks or paper clips in the convenient little squared-off jar, hoping to remember all that little luxury has cost us.

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Trudy Wischemann is a native-born bargain hunter who writes.  You can send her your stories of little luxury hunting c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

The Right to Labor

Published Sept. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     High clouds dim the heat and light this Labor Day morning as I sit down to write, a good day for reflection.  I am celebrating this holiday by exerting my right to labor, even though it is unpaid.  Writing is what I do.

     Many people are celebrating this day by exerting their right to not labor.  On my brief jaunt between Exeter and Lindsay this morning I saw bicyclists coming down off Rocky Hill, exhilarated by their exertions.  Others will celebrate this right to not work by going shopping, cashing in on the Labor Day sales, which have wiped out the right to not work for hundreds of thousands of retail employees who might rather be up at the lake with their friends or attending backyard barbecues.  Thanks to our cultural tendency to celebrate too much, hundreds of thousands of service employees like nurses, EMT’s, rangers and police must also clock in.  Some will even get paid extra for it.

     On my quick trip this morning I saw many others exerting their right to work:  a farmer sitting in his pickup while running furrows in an old orange grove; a farmworker towing a spray rig through rows of citrus; an irrigator on a Kawasaki checking valves in baby mandarins.  A man I know is out near Ivanhoe installing a Blue-Tooth in a harvesting rig for a large walnut grower whose family has been working all weekend getting ready for the shakers.  Walnut growers all over our region are doing the same, their families and employees working overtime.  In farming the days are determined by the progress of the crops, not the calendar.  It’s part of the beauty of farming, if occasionally also part of the grief.

     But mostly my mind is contemplating the larger issue of the right to labor at all.  I started this weekend being interviewed on KFCF’s radio program “Down on the Farm” with Tom Willey.  Tom is an organic farmer in Madera who’s been laboring to feed folks decent food for 40 years, as well as generating programs that promote the small farmer and sustainable agriculture.  For the interview I was joined by Dan O’Connell, a Ph.D. from Cornell who’s worked up farmland conservation easements for Sequoia Riverlands Trust and American Farmland Trust for years and helped start Fresno’s Food Commons.  Dan has organized a speakers series on sustainable ag this fall at the Reedley Peace Center, and the speakers include some of the most important academics and community organizers who have contributed to questions of social justice and environmental quality in our food system for the last 80 years.  The interview with these two men tied up many threads and was mind-enhancing. 

     Then, reading Mark Arax’s phenomenal essay “Phantoms in the fields” in yesterday’s Fresno Bee, the important link between land and the right to labor became clear.  Mark’s story went beyond journalism, portraying the portion of the food system we inhabit locally in our neighborhoods as well as our fields, our politics as well as our plantings. What I saw in his verbal painting was how the right to labor, to earn a living, is determined by the ownership of land.  It is a terrible irony that right now, as some celebrate last week’s legislation increasing the number of hours of overtime pay farm laborers can now receive, their jobs are being eliminated by farmers’ shifts in crops from raisins to almonds, which is, essentially, a decision to mechanize.  No crop is free of this shift, not even olives. Both in the fields and the packinghouses, the landowners’ race is on to replace men and women with machines.

     Perhaps if we understood the “flood” of immigrants from Mexico and points south as being driven by dispossession from land on which people have labored for centuries, people coming here to exert their right to labor somehow, some way, we might seek different solutions.  Until then, building a wall is just an idea for Humpty Trumpty to sit on and make himself feel king-like.  Keep watch for the inevitable.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural researcher who writes.  Thanks to Perla Soria for her educated interest in these issues.  Send your labor rights ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Napa No More?

Published in shorter form August 31, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I have a short-handled hammer sitting on my desk, with the receipt from Lindsay’s Napa Auto Parts underneath it.  It’s holding down more than the receipt:  it’s holding the memory of all the community life I have experienced in that place of business which, unfortunately, is about to disappear.  

     I bought it last week when I went to ask Jose Godoy if the rumor the store is closing was really true.  Jose has been ordering auto parts for me for 12 years, and I could tell from his face, even before he finished helping the customers in front of me, that it was.

     “So what can I help you with, Trudy?” he asked for the hundredth and maybe last time.  I had come wishing I could help him, though I felt helpless enough to cry.  For all the times they have befriended me, he and Joe Lopez (aka “Little Joe”), and their former boss, Bob Kisling, I am clearly in their debt.  “August 31^st is our last day,” he said.

     That part of town has become pretty lifeless in a retail sense, ever since the thrift store, Keys Upholstery and the body shop moved that once inhabited the brick buildings across the street.  Then the discount goods store to the south folded up its tent, and the Stamper Motors building burned, leaving a garish scene of charred devastation for months and months.  It’s not hard to see how business on that block could take a hit.  I sadly paid for my hammer, which will remind me of them every time I see it, and went home.

           

     The next night I found myself at the Lindsay City Council meeting doing battle with the plan to develop a Dollar General store on the southeast corner of the roundabout.  When they first proposed building it on Hermosa, it was a block east, on the southwest corner of Hermosa and Mirage.  They intended to demolish the former Central California Citrus Exchange Building, and they’d hired a residential building appraiser to write a report saying the building was in such horrible condition it couldn’t be saved, hoping to ward off any protest over the loss of this historic architectural resource.  By the grace of God we were able to make the folly of that plan clear, and eventually the building was purchased and restored in four short months.  Let us just say that the City staff was engaged in serious misrepresentation of the building’s true condition in the effort to get Dollar General located on that street.

           

     The plan then shifted then to the west side of that block, proposing to demolish the former Flying A station that had been Ed’s Auto for 3 decades until he sold the business to Miguel Chavez, who operated it as M & J’s Auto Repair.  We opposed that plan in defense of Miguel’s business and also for the inadequate planning assessment, including the obvious traffic problems of cars backed up into the already hard-to-navigate roundabout and 70-foot delivery trucks blocking traffic on Hermosa.  Just as we prepared to go to court on the matter, Dollar General pulled out.  But last week, just two+ years later, after driving Miguel to move, then dismantling the historic Flying A station and demolishing the old Pepper’s Market building, they brought the same plan back.

           

     Everyone I tell about this plan says “That’s not the right place for it.” Instinctively people know what it will do to traffic, but I think they also are responding to the decentering of downtown.  This plan is an effort to make Hermosa the new main street, which has the distinct potential to cause the former downtown brick buildings to be abandoned by businesses trying to survive, hoping to catch the new wave before they drown.  It’s a perfect example of 1960’s strip mall development that emptied downtowns across the country, a planning mistake we’ve been trying to overcome for at least 3, if not 5 decades.

           

     Tuesday night at the council meeting I proposed modifications to the new/old site plan that would make the parking lot entrance a little further from the roundabout, and other changes that could make the roundabout intersection more public-friendly.  But I also reminded them of another site that supposedly was considered when Dollar General first proposed building in our town.

           

     It’s that now-empty parcel of land across from Napa’s building, the old Stamper Motors site.   The fire that demolished that building occurred Thanksgiving weekend 2014, about 6 months after Dollar General pulled out of Lindsay, avoiding our lawsuit.  Although it took many months for the site to be cleared of rubble, it has been waiting patiently for redevelopment.  And after Tuesday’s council meeting, in the middle of a good night’s sleep, I realized that’s where the placement of a Dollar General store would do the most good for reviving the downtown.

           

     I took this fresh-born idea to Jose a day later and asked “Do you think having that store across the street would help your business here?”  You should have seen his face.  Hope filled the room.  It not only would bring new customers to an old part of town that could use them, it would also eliminate the roundabout traffic jams and delivery truck issues we identified Tuesday night because the site is near the oldest, easiest truck route in town.

           

     So add your prayer to God’s good grace if you feel the same.  It will take something like an act of Congress to get this project to relocate – but that’s what I thought when we were trying to keep them from demolishing the Citrus Exchange Building.  That gleaming little building reminds me to not lose hope.  Maybe we can keep Napa Auto Parts after all.

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Trudy Wischemann is a community researcher and rural advocate who writes.  Thanks to new councilman Brian Watson for his interest in building standards and revamping truck routes in town.  Send your community redesign ideas to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

True Community

Published August 24, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “What is your vision for Lindsay?” asked the new editor of this paper, Paul Myers, last week when I met with him and former editor Reggie Ellis, now publisher.  It was a fair question, and one that made me think, especially as I prepared to make objections to the new (same old) Dollar General site plan review that was presented to the City Council for approval at the August 23rd meeting. 

       My first words in reply were, in fact, objections to the vision of Lindsay’s past and present administrations and the forces of urbanization.  Call me crazy, but I wish we could retain something of what it means to be rural:  a local economy generated by and serving those who live here, with authentic social and political structures that encourage and teach the newcomers to this country how to be members of this place while embracing and serving those who entered long ago.  I wish we could re-envision the value of the lives of those who make their livings growing and harvesting the fruits of this land, and celebrate those things in our cultural events.   I wish we could respect the limitations of this semi-desert land we inhabit and not just mine its groundwater and the government programs offered in the spirit of equality. 

       Despite the odds, what I wish we could become is true community, with an emphasis on the “true.”  Falsehood is one of the things we have been fighting since the triple-stacked loans were discovered around 2009, those loans intended to get 50 or more low-income buyers into homes of their own that went instead to 13 city employees.  What stunned us most were the lies the city staff had told themselves justifying the stacking, staff who still hold paid positions there now.  I can’t even remember the term they used for this “creative” packaging, the self-deception was that appalling.  

       Lest you think something’s changed, let me dump a few dates on you.  On July 12, Councilman Mecum resigned.  On July 18, the application for the Dollar General site plan review was signed by property owners Serna and Llewallyn, complete with unsigned engineered drawings and maps and a categorical exemption from the CEQA process which addresses none of the concerns we raised in our lawsuit two years ago.  This past Friday, when I walked into the city clerk’s office to find out the status of the new Dollar General plan, Brian Spaunhurst, the planning assistant working under Bill Zigler, was preparing the document for this week’s council agenda.  Two years ago, after the developer pulled out of that project, we had requested that we be informed if that project was resumed, a request which obviously had been ignored. 

       Let me say that I’m not opposed to having Dollar General in town, except for the fact that the profits will be siphoned off to DG headquarters, there will be few employees with non-existent benefits, and their building designs are straight out of the 1960’s, complete with no windows.  I’m also a little concerned that it will drive its main competitor out of town, which in my mind would be Rite Aid, and that would leave us with no pharmacy. 

       I am opposed to having Dollar General at this site.  Located on the southeast corner of the roundabout, the blank backside of the building will be turned toward Hermosa, a major thoroughfare.  Located there, the increased traffic is a potential threat to foot traffic and other drivers, including the Dollar General delivery trucks, which will be making left-hand turns across Hermosa where cars are just exiting the roundabout.  I am also opposed to the way the CEQA process, which in a true community would allow us to consider these factors publicly, is being violated.  But Bill Zigler wants it there.  He’s worked hard to make this happen, and that’s what he’s going to get come hell or high water. 

       “In true community,” wrote Parker J. Palmer, that Quaker sage on community and education, “we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives….Community will teach us that our grip on truth is fragile and incomplete, that we need many ears to hear the fullness of God’s word for our lives.”   

       In true community, it matters what other people think, especially those who live there.  Someone hired to manage the interests of that community should work to reconcile the conflicting interests of its members, not override them – especially someone who does not live there and thus does not personally bear the consequences of his actions.  So call me crazy, but I’ll keep working for true community, thank you, despite the odds.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher who writes.    You can send your stories of community bravery and betrayal to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Nancy and David Vega for their friendship and feedback.