When older generations talk about what it was like growing up in Hawaii, particularly on the neighbor islands, in the days before cellphones and internet and big-box stores, the stories often land on the theme of choice. As in, there wasn’t much.
If we didn’t find what we wanted in the store or in the Sears catalog, we either made it ourselves or went without. We never imagined a time when we could scour a global online marketplace for anything our hearts desired.
Now we have the illusion of infinite choices, yet we are still limited by the simple fact that Hawaii is an island state.
In this part of the legislative session, the reality of limited choices starts to annoyingly assert its presence. The hopeful notion that we can have everything comes smashing into the truth that an island is all about remoteness and smallness. To live well on an island, you have to choose well.
As the great orator Billy Kenoi once said (yeah, I’m about to quote Billy Kenoi. He’ll be back. Wait and see), choices become even more important when you have very few to make. Kenoi, in a 2006 speech, told of a youthful indiscretion that led to a brief loss of freedom:
“… where the only choice you get is, every day … ‘Milk or juice?’ And you take your time because that’s your only choice over there. Milk or juice? Milk or juice? Milk or juice? … Hooo … I go with the juice, brah.”
On an island a lot of things do come down to this or that. Milk or juice.
If we’re going to take farmland and turn it into housing, that’s fine, but then that land can’t produce food crops. No one should be ashamed of creating housing, but don’t pretend we can have both in the same place.
And if we say farming or ranching uses too much water or too many chemicals or creates too much dust or animal waste, then we’re choosing to buy most of our food from the mainland and use the land for something else, maybe condos for wealthy tourists.
If we say we want renewable energy but then we just don’t want to look at it, there is a choice that must be made. Wind farms and solar farms and geothermal energy plants aren’t invisible.
We can go forever increasing tourism numbers, but that choice means we don’t get to have things like open roads and uncrowded beaches.
Politicians like to pretend we don’t have to make hard choices, because they often get blamed for what gets lost, but the day of reckoning is coming. There is no milk AND juice.
As the great Oprah Winfrey once said (yeah, I’m quoting Oprah and Billy Kenoi in the same column. Oh to be a fly on the wall if they ever got together to talk story over pupu and juice), “You can have it all, just not all at once.”
And not all on one island.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
