Aloha Spirit

I've been struggling a lot lately with the concept of "aloha spirit" that is so frequently talked about in Hawaii. I know that people like to think of Hawaii as somehow different from everywhree else. In a lot of ways, it is, but I'm not convinced that it's different in the way that people want it to be. Here is a series of events that has led me to question how "different" Hawaii really is from anywhere else:

In late December, a Kahului man shot to death his own 19-year-old son in a dispute over, of all things, the son having left a game controller on the floor. It was the first murder on Maui in 2008, but it was followed shortly by:

The first murder of 2009. A Kahului woman stabbed her boyfriend to death in a dispute over her alcoholism.

On New Year's Eve, my roommate's car was broken into. About a week and a half later, it was stolen (presumably by the same people) and has not been recovered. I doubt we'll ever see it again. (Don't feel too bad. It was a POS car, only $800, and he didn't even have it insured.)

Last week, a man followed another man into the store where my husband works and started a fight with him that broke one of the store's window frames. It turns out to have stemmed from a road rage incident, although witnesses all felt that the instigator was high on drugs.

And I could go on, but I think you get the point.

I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've had people tell me how jealous they are that I live in Hawaii. It honestly perplexes me. In the most basic sense, Hawaii is no different than anywhere else. For the most part, you can't get by without a job. I don't know anyone here who spends all day on the beach. We all work. We all go to the store. We all sit home some nights and watch TV. And we all have problems.

Hawaii isn't some magical place that's outside the normal realm of human existence. Maybe if you could be on permanent vacation it would be, but that's not reality for 99% of the human race.

So does "aloha" really exist? I think it does. But I just see it as basic kindness. I've lived in other places where people are just as friendly and genuine. And I've lived in other places where they're not as friendly or genuine. I haven't seen anything special yet, but here is a nice story to leave you with:

In November, we were in the middle of a move that left our bank account briefly depleted. I went to Costco to buy some rolls for Thanksgiving dinner, not knowing that they don't take credit cards (I never shopped at Costco before moving here) and unaware that my husband hadn't deposited the cash our roommate had given him, as he had told me he would. Needless to say, when I got to the checkout, I didn't have enough cash to buy both bags of rolls that I wanted. It was excrutiatingly embarrassing. I was fumbling for the cash to buy just one bag when the lady in line behind me graciously gave me the money to cover the second bag.

It's two months later, and I still feel so grateful.

And the Scandal Deepens....

Last week, a "group of Maui residents" (as the Maui News described them) initiated a petition to have county council member Wayne Nishiki impeached, based on the late filing of his financial disclosure.

Really, color me shocked. I never thought it would get this far. I have to admit that I have a hard time understanding where all of the moral outrage is coming from here. Are people angry about the perceived deception, or about the possibility that one of our council members could "owe" something to the biggest, baddest development company on the island?

Whether it's the former or the latter, I'd be really dumbfounded to discover that people on Maui are somehow ridiculously naive, as compared to the rest of the country. Do you really think politicians never deceive, never use smoke and mirrors, never fudge the truth? And what is politics if not deal-making and compromises done behind closed doors? Honestly, you'd think the island of Maui had never seen a political scandal before.

Maybe I'm just a cynic. But I don't think what Nishiki did was all that bad. And I certainly don't think it's worth an impeachment. A reprimand, certainly, but impeachment? Seems a touch dramatic to me.

At any rate, I was feeling a little suspicious of the motivations of the people leading the impeachment charge. The Maui News did not identify the group, and listed their leader only as "Dave Mackwell," without any explanation of who he is or how he's associated with the situation. 

So I followed the newspaper's link to the impeachment group's website. (Sorry, no link; I don't care attach it to my blog.) They also fail to identify themselves as anything other than "angry Maui residents." They make no mention of Dave Mackwell. However, they do take great pains to note that they are "in no way affiliated" with Don Couch, Nishiki's opponent in the hotly contested battle for the council seat that Nishiki won.

Hmmm, I thought to myself, methinks they doth protest too much.

So I started doing a little digging around on the Internet, and here's what I discovered. Dave Mackwell is a former board president of the Kihei Community Association. Don Couch currently serves on the board of the Kihei Community Association. How interesting.

Now, I don't have any conclusive evidence at this point which would prove that they served on the board at the same time, but it appears as though they did. They both seem to have been on the board within the last few years, and I gather that they may have overlapped for at least one of those years. It's a small board. I find it hard to believe - if they did serve at the same time - that they didn't get to know one another.

Which leads me to ponder: Does the Mackwell group's drive to impeachment really have nothing to do with Don Couch? And if these two men do in fact know one another, isn't this just as deceptive as what Nishiki did?

And, seriously, what's up Maui News? I found out this info by using Google. You might want to try it. Scandal sells papers, you know!

Will update when and if I find out more on this topic.

33 Going on 13

One of my brothers was complaining to me the other day that his co-workers were making fun of him for bringing his lunch to work. Now, it's a firmly well-established fact that my brother works with a bunch of petty idiots, but I found this particular incident rather perplexing. How could grown adults possibly consider this something to make fun of?

I thought about it for a while, and it struck me that the last time I ran into this kind of attitude was when I was in junior high. Back then, it was "uncool" to bring your lunch to school. Only losers did that. I remember because we were pretty poor growing up. I couldn't afford hot lunch, so I was definitely one of those uncool losers. But I also remember leaving that attitude behind a long time ago. In fact, pretty much everywhere I've ever worked as an adult, bringing one's lunch to work was the norm.

This line of thought brought me to something my husband is frequently saying. I belong to an on-line forum where there is a fair amount of drama and stupidity. Whenever I complain about this to my husband, he says, "Well, everybody is 13 online." Which, when you think about it, is an apt description of many online encounters.

So this has got me to thinking. I wonder if, on the inside, we're all still 13 years old? Of course, some of us are better at controlling it than others, and some are better at hiding it than others. But what if our inner 13-year-old lurks there all the time, just waiting to burst forth when our guard is down?

I definitely see mine in me. She's been around a lot lately.

I don't like my 13-year-old self all that much. She's not who I want to be. I remember other selves that I like better. There was my 20-year-old self, who traipsed off to another country and finally learned how to make real friends. She was pretty cool. And there was my 23-year-old self, who moved to Portland with little more than a job and two suitcases, who managed to build a nice life for herself. She was a lot braver than she realized at the time. Then there was my 29-year-old self, who learned to stand on her own again. She had a couple of pretty good years, despite a few hardships.

I know all those selfs I admire are still in there too. So I wonder why the 13-year-old still resonates so loudly, these 20 years later?

The Last Post of 2008 - Sorry It's a Downer

2008 was kind of a rough year for me. In Nov. 2007, while on a course of antibiotics for a UTI, I contracted a serious bacterial infection of the intestines. It took me a full six months to rid myself of this infection. I was on antibiotics for almost the whole six months, and had to follow an extremely restrictive diet. It was miserable.  I lost a lot of weight and felt terrible all of the time.

Fortunately, I got better right as my now-husband and I were planning to go on vacation. Initially, we had intended to go to Mexico, but after my illness, I didn't want to take any chances with possibly poorly prepared food. So we decided to go to Hawaii instead. My husband chose Maui because we'd never been here (I had never been to Hawaii at all). While researching things for the trip, he discovered the job that he would eventually get that would lead us to move to Maui.

We became engaged on our vacation. But what should have been a happy occasion for me really wasn't. We spent most of our vacation exploring the island in a "do we want to live here" way, in case he got the job. It wasn't very fun. Honestly, I never felt very impressed with Maui. I knew I didn't want to live here, and I hoped that he wouldn't get the job. Obviously, I hoped in vain. I cried when I found out we were moving here. A lot.

We were originally planning a small, simple wedding for the Fall. We opted instead to get married in a "quickie" ceremony before we moved here. And then we were off. I said goodbye to the best friends I had ever made, to the place where I had worked for 8 years, to the city I had lived in and loved for 10 years. Everyone was happy for me, many of them jealous, but I dreaded the move to Hawaii.

It's hard for me to tell if I'm not giving Maui a chance or if it just isn't the place for me. I feel so out of place here. I would like to love Maui the way so many people do; it would make life so much easier. I'd be so much happier. I've essentially been miserable the whole time I've been here. I feel like a superhero who has been removed from her source of power.

At the end of the day, the only reason I'm here is because I couldn't deny my husband the chance to take the best opportunity that had come his way in a long time. I would expect him to do the same thing for me.

One of the most frustrating things about being both very self-aware and socially conscious is understanding - on an intellectual level - that my problems are minimal in comparison to the problems of many others. But I think that what amounts to existential angst is a very painful thing to experience. I feel crippled by the inability to truly enjoy things. I'm also aware that it's my own fault. It is my own choices and actions (or lack thereof) that have led me to this impasse.

I'm not yet sure what 2009 is going to bring. I would like to take this negative feeling I've had all year and turn it into something more positive. There's this line in the Jethro Tull song "Inside" that I love. It goes: "And I won't worry about a thing because we've got it made. Here on the inside, outside's so far away."

I'd like for that to become true for me in 2009.

Journalistic Integrity

I've still been thinking a lot about the Nishiki scandal, although it seems, by and large, to have blown over at this point. As someone commented on my previous post about Nishiki, there's a lot more to the Nishiki story than the simple facts of what occurred.

It honestly astounds me that the Nishiki story broke after the election. While I know that it's dangerous to continue comparing Portland to Maui, it's hard not to in this case. Back in Portland, a scandal like Nishiki's would have broken months before the election was held.  Not only would the Willamette Weekly, Portland's trendy, non-mainstream weekly newspaper, have been all over the story, so too would have the Oregonian, the state's largest paper.

I would think that investigating a candidate's financial background would be a top priority on any journalist's list. So what happened here? I'm inclined to think that it's merely sloppy, amateurish journalism. In reading all of the papers here on Maui, I frequently find myself disappointed with the quality and frustrated with the lack of actual information presented. Where is the substance?

However, I'm still essentially a newcomer to Maui. There could perhaps be more to the story. Are Maui journalists complicit in covering up damaging stories for Maui politicians? I find this highly unlikely, but it's not unheard of. Politics is certainly filled with a vast amount of corruption, which seems to bleed into all other aspects of life.

This is an interesting journey that I have been on over the last 5 months, as I learn to adjust to this new place. I learn more and more every day. Back in Portland, I volunteered over the course of several years for a non-profit, independent, left-leaning newspaper. It was a paper that was beholden to no one, that chased stories no matter the fall out. It was interesting and informative. I would love to see a paper like that on Maui.

So often here, I feel starved for information and "out of touch." How I would love to not feel that any longer.

Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave

I recently got sucked into a political scandal that developed on Maui after the Nov. 4 election.  I have to admit, local politics here are a bit bewildering to me. I think maybe you need to live here for a while before it all starts making any kind of sense. But the uproar over the Nishiki brouhaha has been rather loud, and it caught my attention, so I started to do a little digging to figure out what was going on.

So Wayne Nishiki, it seems, was a retired county council member.  (On Maui, there is no city government, only county government, which also includes the islands - counties- of Lanai and Molokai.)  He left politics 4 years ago - to do what, I'm not sure.  Seems he has a stand at the farmers market?  At any rate, during his tenure on the council, Nishiki was well known for his anti-development stance.

Development is a very hot button topic here.  Really, it's kind of a dirty word.  The prevailing sentiment on the island is the "anti" standpoint, which I do get.  Without proper laws in place, it's hard to control development, and your elected officials really have to want to do it.  And most people have no interest in Maui becoming another Oahu.  From what I've seen of Oahu, I totally agree with that, because yeah, yuck.

Apparently, during his retirement, in 2005, Nishiki accepted a $100,000 business loan from Dowling, the biggest and "slickest" (as I have heard it described) development company on the island.  Then, in 2008, he decided to run for the council again.  Nishiki won the council seat, by a mere 2,000 votes, in November.  However, he had neglected to file the proper paperwork to publicize the loan he received in 2005.  In fact, news of the loan didn't didn't reach the public until a week after the election.  And that's when the sh*t hit the fan, as they say.

There are a lot of people angry with Wayne Nishiki.  The more cynical believe that this was a long-term, evil plan.  He gets the loan in 2005, waits a few years, and then gets re-elected so he can start scratching a few backs.  While that seems a tad far-fetched to me (it seems a rather long time for Dowling to wait to get their payback), I do get where people are coming from.  I wouldn't trust pretty much any politician as far as I could throw them, particularly not after what we've seen in the last 8 years on the national level.

Nishiki says the loan was innocent. He says that he became friends with Dowling over the years.  I'm inclined to actually believe him. I certainly have friends who believe the exact opposite of me, and they would probably give me money if I needed it. I find it hard to believe that a man who spent 14 scandal-free years opposing development would have such a sudden change of heart. But I could be wrong.

What I find less innocent is his "neglecting" to file the paperwork until when it would coincidentally do the least amount of damage to his campaign.  I think it's pretty obvious he did it on purpose.  He knew it was a political hot potato, and he knew it would likely scuttle his campaign.  So he went the route of most politicians and did something underhanded to win the election.  A politician caught being dishonest?  Really not the most shocking thing in the world.

I think the best thing he could have done for himself is disclose the money from the very beginning of his campaign.  He might not have won, but I think he would have had a shot. Americans in this day and age are hungering for politicians they can trust. I think they would have had some amount of admiration for a man who disclosed potentially scandalous information right from the start.

The question is, what happens now? Many are calling for him to resign. Certainly, if he stays, his whole tenure will be tainted. He will never be able to vote on any Dowling projects without the specter of this looming over his head. If he votes for a single one . . . I can already hear the howls of anger.

I don't know what the answer is, but I'm looking forward to keeping my eye on it.

Thanksgiving vs. Christmas

I love Thanksgiving.  It's my favorite holiday.  I think that, in spirit (if you ignore the whole slaughtering of Native Americans thing), Thanksgiving is the purest holiday.  It's all about family, friends, good food, and taking stock of what's important in your life.  It's a holiday that genuinely makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

So I have to confess that I get angry every year that Thanksgiving is more and more overlooked.  As soon as the Halloween decorations come down, the Christmas decorations go up.  The commercials start on TV; the Christmas music gets played in the stores.  The pressure to BUY ramps up about 200%.  

Frankly, I find it sickening.  I realize that Thanksgiving isn't a "consuming" holiday in the sense that it's not really a holiday one buys a lot of stuff for.  I know that this is why American businesses try to rush us straight from Halloween into Christmas every year.  This is what makes it particularly disgusting to me.

Let's ignore the holiday that encourages us to reflect on what makes our lives special in order to BUY things?  What kind of message is that?

I was hoping that I might get away from some of this in Hawaii.  It certainly seems to be outside of a lot of the bad influences of the mainland in a lot of ways.  People are kinder and more trusting here.  They have a a different view on life and what's important.  So I thought maybe this would be different too.  I have, however, been sadly disappointed.  I guess, no matter where you live, you still deal with the same companies, the same chains; they make a cookie cutter life for everyone.

But they can't force me to spend nearly two months celebrating Christmas. They can't suck meaning from me.  I'm going to live life on my own terms.