“Laying blame” is something most of us do, even knowing in our guts that it’s risky. Outloud, it can incite a riot, trigger a backlash, or cause someone to point out that we’re blind to our own faults. Kept inside, it can prevent us from discovering our own responsibility. The wise among us usually keep their opinions to themselves or deliver them nonjudgmentally. Poet Emily Dickenson advised writers to “tell it slant.”
Most of you know I have not taken those paths. Despite the risks, there are some benefits to being blunt. Last week a friend called to rebut something in “Out of Sight” (4-22-26) where I’d complained about the Tule Subbasin’s opaque Policy Committee. I learn from every sentence he utters, so I was glad he called. He even forwarded information about the stakeholder committee being formed by the new Tule East GSA (call 559-370-1885 or email tuleeastgsa@gmail.com for more information or to apply).
However, he left untouched the main contention of that piece: that the big boys are calling the shots again and that darkness is their favorite place to work. In that piece I was saying, perhaps slantwise, that the policy committee had got their problem statement wrong: by laying blame on Delano-Earlimart ID for their probation woes, they were avoiding pointing fingers at the real perpetrators of subsidence in the Tule Subbasin and thus not likely to stop it. The damning sentence was: “For holding their feet to the fire, Mr. Quinley is being made a scapegoat, while Mr. Vidovich and his posse get away with groundwater murder.”
Are some things better left unsaid? I’m not sure where the line is, only that I’ve been called to cross it in matters of water and land. I cross it in the name of those who crossed it before me and in the name of a real future for this region. The big boys have no inhibitions about gutting that future if we do not stand up to them.
That said, there are some interesting initiatives rising up in response to the dire straits we are in for small farmers who just want to keep farming and poor people who just want to eat and have a roof over their heads. One is called the “f3 Initiative” in which CAFF (Community Alliance with Family Farms) has a hand. The other is a revamp of George Ballis’s National Land for People called “People, Food and Land Foundation,” a resurrection ignited by Janaki Anagha, the fireball community organizer/attorney in Dan O’Connell’s book “In the Struggle.”
I am thrilled about both efforts, but unsure about their problem statements. I’m uneasy from years of experience with nonprofits, whose funding often comes from wealthy people who are understandably reluctant to challenge the sources of piled-up wealth. But it also comes from my graduate work in environmental planning and one particular planner-turned-professor, Bob Twiss.
I haven’t forgotten what Bob told us in our first planning class because it’s proved true in all areas of my life. When planning fails to produce the desired results, he said, it usually comes from two things. One is not getting the problem statement right, i.e., you can’t fix a problem whose cause hasn’t been rightly identified. The second source of failure comes from not taking enough time to flush out all the possible solutions among all the people involved and/or from not being able to winnow down those solutions to one that most people can support. Not mentioned then but implicit is the importance of participants being equally weighted; the time required to find the right solution often is truncated by people in power.
Much can be done by people led by something beyond rational means, by some force uniting people looking for solutions to problems so big that naming them would slam the door. I understand the reluctance to lay blame where the first response of the blamed might be harmful or deadly — think ICE, think Putin, think Trump, for instance. But there also comes a time of reckoning, where the failure to lay blame becomes part of the problem. I think that’s where we are at this moment of groundwater redistribution, and I don’t think we’ll benefit by keeping our heads in the sand. That sand will be dry before we know it.
Trudy Wischemann is a water lover who writes. Send her your problem statements c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
