<div>May we discover that the road we didn’t choose,didn’t want to travel,is a highway that leads unerringlytowards the light.Oct. 26 reading in The Still Small Voice, 2012It had been a while since I stood at the podium before the Lindsay City Council, but last Tuesday I spent all day preparing a public comment that would fit into the three minutes allowed. There were rumors of mismanagement of the water fund, triggering nightmares from the past when the entire city was mismanaged. With my attention drawn to Alpaugh and Allensworth lately, I feared I’d slipped in caring for my adopted home town.As I searched for words, I realized just how difficult it is to serve a community like ours rightly. Lindsay’s birth was illegitimate and backwards, a product of Southern Pacific’s land development schemes designed to serve the railroad’s needs, not the population of the countryside which hadn’t yet developed. The location was chosen by distance from the steam engines’ last water tank, not for good soils or water supply, both limited here.Yet the town grew. Early farm families raised complementary orange and olive groves and built Lindsay Olive, which became the largest producer-owned marketing co-op in the state. After the Friant-Kern Canal stabilized the water supply for both farms and town, Sunkist (also a producer-owned co-op) grew with the arrival of orange growers fleeing Los Angeles. The fall-winter-spring harvests provided work in fields and packinghouses during dead times in other parts of the valley, allowing immigrant families to send down roots, keep the kids in school, and become members of this community. To make this their home town.But with the decline of family farms in the late 1980s and Lindsay Olive’s collapse, the farm-town connection began to fail. In the ‘90s, Lindsay adopted a “strong city manager” form of government, as if that could compensate for the destruction of its economic base.Projects in the early 2000s designed to make us great again brought us instead to the brink of bankruptcy.And the town would have failed had not a small group of residents revolted in 2010. Riled by the revelation our city manager was the third-highest paid public employee in Tulare County, they marched down Tulare Road waving red flags, enraging the bulls in city hall. A special public meeting was held in the high school gym to quell the uprising. More than 800 people attended, and many spoke. But the one I’ll never forget was Mr. Seraphim Rivera, who once had been on the March to Sacramento with Cesar and Dolores. In Spanish and then in English, he simply said “I don’t think you know what it’s like to lie awake nights wondering how you’re going to pay your water bill.”Mayor Murray thought he was complaining about the cost and said the water fund is a separate enterprise, it has to pay for itself and can’t be touched (which they later forgot). But what Mr. Rivera was actually decrying was the income disparity between the people planning the future of the town and those folks living its present. He was standing up for equality and was able to do so because of his standing in this community.Though I was reluctant to get involved, I jumped in after hearing Mr. Rivera’s sentence and the mayor’s unenlightened reply. For four years, those of us who rallied to the cause gave hours of unpaid time, non-reimbursed expenses and received mountains of grief for our efforts. But it was worth it because this is our home town and Lindsay is worth saving.The quality of life here is precious. What I most treasure is the ability to defend the notion of equality without fearing ridicule. The people now guiding our town all have worked through the inequalities of our culture and staked a claim to Lindsay’s future. The two councilwomen about to depart, Yolanda Flores and Rosaena Sanchez, were leaders in the original revolt. They have served through the long years of reform and feel they're leaving the city in better shape than they found it.After sitting through the council meeting last Tuesday night, one made especially long by public engagement, I believe they're right.Though I wouldn’t have chosen the turmoil and didn’t want to travel that road, it led to actual improvements. It’s sometimes what our home towns require of us. Press on.Trudy Wischemann is enormously grateful to the Sun-Gazette for its support through those difficult years. Send her your stories of protests c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay 93247</div>

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It had been a while since I stood at the podium before the Lindsay City Council, but last Tuesday I spent all day preparing a public comment that would fit into the three minutes allowed. There were rumors of mismanagement of the water fund, triggering nightmares from the past when the entire city was mismanaged. With my attention drawn to Alpaugh and Allensworth lately, I feared I’d slipped in caring for my adopted home town.

Notes From Home: Home Towns

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It had been a while since I stood at the podium before the Lindsay City Council, but last Tuesday I spent all day preparing a public comment that would fit

Notes From Home: Home Towns

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