We the people hold the solutions to Hawaii’s problems
By Dawn Morais Webster 08/13/10
We the people hold the answer to how Hawaii comes to grips with what ails a place reflexively referred to as “paradise.” The ailments are many and life-threatening, as the 29 essays in the new book, The Value of Hawaii just published for the Biographical Research Center by the University of Hawaii Press make abundantly clear. But equally clear is the message that we do not have to accept as inevitable the fact that education, social services, healthcare, the environment and cultural preservation are “slouching towards total dysfunction” (Howes, 2). We can, if we care enough to collaborate, “help each other to crawl our way out of our fiscal malaise”(Blair, 84).
Businesses will find much in this very timely volume edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio, that could help restore authenticity to the taglines, branding and marketing messages that have strip-mined the foundational, life-giving concepts of aloha and ohana. What once was good for the bottom line of industries like tourism has cost Hawaii dearly in terms of what has been lost culturally. Contributor Ramsay Taum reminds us that we “need to start reinvesting in the social, cultural, environmental, and spiritual banks of Hawaii if we hope to rebuild and strengthen the cash ones” (38).
At a time when businesses have been cutting back on investments in people, training and marketing and holding off on planned expansion or new ventures in order to husband their resources and wait for the good times to come back any day now, the essayists in The Value of Hawaii suggest actions that may seem counter-intuitive. In one way or another each calls for the courage to spend, to invest, and even, in some cases, to raise taxes. But to do it where it is needed most.
This isn’t the left gone lunatic. It’s a diversity of authoritative voices challenging business and government, the community and the individual to embrace their civic responsibility to engage more fully in the democratic process, to vote, to view regulatory and service agencies not as the enemy, but as the protectors of the public good. It starts with each of us recognizing that education, infrastructure and social services need to be paid for, that they are not discretionary bonuses but essential investments for the kind of society we all say we want.
A Culture of Sharing
What most businesses don’t want are conversations about Hawaiian sovereignty and activism. Labor unions have a similar unsettling effect on those who shrink from challenges to the status quo. And yet as Jonathan Osorio points out, at the heart of the sovereignty movement is a continual assertion of “a culture of sharing and interdependency with all of the life around us” (21). Lowell Chun-Hoon makes a similar argument that businesses may view with some skepticism: namely, that what drives unionism at its best are “teamwork and collective action” and a “dedication to higher causes than one’s narrow self-interest” (68).
Mari Matsuda points out that we have lost sight of the ethic of “mutual care and mutual responsibility” that underpinned the ahupua`a system in which “all work was valued…and everyone was expected to learn” (99). Furlough Fridays and the short-changing of Hawaii’s children happened because everyone lost their way and very few knew they had or cared to risk leading the way. “Pay now or pay later: failing to teach a child costs” (99), says Matsuda.
What has all this to do with business? Everything. Businesses need an educated, motivated workforce from which to hire and they must be able to look to public as much as to private schools for that raw talent. Public policies that ensure a living environment that treats all workers and their families equally also help keep and attract strong talent. Mari Matsuda was referring to public education when she said in her essay “No, it’s our fault, and we can do something about it” (93). But she might just as well have been speaking of Hawaiian issues or agriculture or race relations or transportation or prisons or the social services or homelessness or the arts or the environment or historic preservation or sustainability.
The Value of Hawaii: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future is essential reading for every voter -- and everyone who has not yet registered to vote. In this election season, knowing the past means looking for where those who would lead us stand on the issues that will shape our future. We the people would do well to ask what each candidate stood for before they stood for office.
