Friday, June 19, 2009
Akaka bill blues
by Larry Geller
(thanks to Dick Mayer for pointer to this story)
This is as upbeat as this NY Times story gets:
The state of Hawaii turns 50 this year (it joined the union on Aug. 21, 1959). People there should be happy. But it’s hard.
The economy is really bad. The housing market and construction industry are in deep slumps. Tourism has been hammered by the recession and swine flu. Unemployment is double what it was a year ago. To close a $688 million budget gap, the governor announced the most drastic furlough program in the country. She’s closing state offices three days a month, for two years. Aloha Friday, where people go to work in aloha shirts and muumuus, is going to be Furlough Friday, where they stay home in pajamas and look for jobs on the Internet.
And now, to top everything off, a communist dictator supposedly wants to blow up Hawaii. A Japanese newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun, reported this week that North Korea planned to launch a ballistic missile in Hawaii’s direction around the Fourth of July. [NY Times, Hawaii Blues,6/20/2009]
I’m going to clip this one and send it to the next relative who chides us for living in “Paradise.”
The article is flip about our troubles, and plugs the Akaka bill. I suppose it’s too much to ask that it recognize that many Native Hawaiians, supposedly the beneficiaries of that legislation, feel it is simply the next step in colonization of their land. Or something like that, I shouldn’t interpret.
You interpret better than most and certainly better than those who promote the status of Tribes on the mainland as some kind of justice.... shows to go ya not many folks have ever actually ever seen a reservation and how the people live there, especially those promoting this "akaka bill". who would wish that kind of life on anyone?
: June 20, 2009 at 5:25:00 PM HST << Home
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