Trudy Wischemann

Last Sunday, Memorial Day weekend, our beautiful pastor started our congregational prayer thanking God for all the blessings we receive, from large to small, from day-to-day to once-in-a-lifetime. The list was long, the range wide, so it wasn’t hard to find yourself somewhere within that spectrum of light. We all are blessed, and it wasn’t hard to feel it on that beautiful, fresh last Sunday of May here in sunny California.

It is common knowledge among people whom we have categorized as “disadvantaged communities” or “people of color” that their disadvantages come not just from their location or skin tones, but also from the fact that they don’t have money. As we all know, money rules.

After writing “Money Rules,” where I suggest we change some of the rules permitting money’s power, I found myself reading a book on one of the earliest large-scale, corporate industrialized farming operations in the San Joaquin Valley, Miller & Lux.

A sentence caught me off guard the other day, and I have been singing river songs ever since. “Across the wide Missouri,” was the phrase that hooked me, the ending line of the American folk song “Shenandoah.” It made me homesick even though I’ve never seen that river or lived in its valley.

A sentence caught me off guard the other day, and I have been singing river songs ever since. “Across the wide Missouri,” was the phrase that hooked me, the ending line of the American folk song “Shenandoah.” It made me homesick even though I’ve never seen that river or lived in its valley.

There’s a brand-new book I must tell you about, “Pick Up Your Name and Write,” a biography of the Tulare Okie poet laureate, Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. The author is my friend Betty Blanks, an emeritus lawyer in Visalia who shared the final years of stewarding Wilma’s spinster life with me and two other magical spirits, Lillian Vallee of Modesto and Jim Chlebda of Springville. The book is a labor of love, for sure, as well as pure Okie working class persistence.

My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty… The song floats through my mind as we move toward the 248th birthday of our precious democracy. Sweet land of liberty – how are we doing?I learned this song a decade before the civil rights movement, though a century after it was due.

I started Independence Day by harvesting some of my baby carrots. While scrubbing them in the kitchen sink, I dreamed that I was celebrating my independence from the carrot magnates who are busily destroying Cuyama Valley with their deep pockets and deep pumps (for an update, see Melinda Burns’ fine July 1 article “Draining Groundwater and Pocketbooks in the Cuyama Valley”).

I started Independence Day by harvesting some of my baby carrots. While scrubbing them in the kitchen sink, I dreamed that I was celebrating my independence from the carrot magnates who are busily destroying Cuyama Valley with their deep pockets and deep pumps (for an update, see Melinda Burns’ fine July 1 article “Draining Groundwater and Pocketbooks in the Cuyama Valley”).

After listening to the Republican National Convention’s final night of speeches Thursday, I find myself needing to speak on behalf of truth. “What is truth?” Pilate asks Jesus on his final day. Jesus does not speak, perhaps because his tongue is swollen, his mouth sealed shut from his beatings. Or perhaps it’s like we’ve been told to interpret his silence: because the truth speaks for itself.