Big ideas leave many wondering, ‘Wait, what?’

On Friday night in Kakaako, two young men dropped out of the sky and landed in the parking lot by CosmoProf. First one, then the other, like mosquitoes aiming for a juicy arm or cartoon spies appearing out of nowhere with no reasonable explanation. Each gathered up his parachute and ran like hell down the street, presumably to a waiting car, leaving onlookers going, “Wait, what was that?”

It happened too fast to whip out phones and record video.

And so it goes in modern Honolulu, where strange sights appear right before our eyes and, before we can react, the perpetrators have gathered up and run off into the night, leaving us wondering if we should have done something and what exactly that something would be.

Jump first, move fast, and make sure you’re not around when people start to ask questions. That’s how things get done around here.

A lead-in like that usually heads directly to a rant about rail, but let’s save that for last so as not to be too obvious.

Let’s start with millions of dollars supporting homeless shelters that sit many nights with empty beds because they were established with “build it and they will come” optimism and not the hard reality that many of Oahu’s homeless willingly choose their lifestyle. Those were hopeful leaps into the dark.

Then there’s the visitor industry that has grown past the ability to show tourists a good time. Tourists notice the traffic and count the hours of their vacation wasted on our ugly roads. They get disappointed by “remote” trails with hundreds of people filing through every hour and “unspoiled” beaches that are showing signs of spoilage. They wonder why all the stores here are the exact stores they have back home. But Hawaii has taken that leap, encouraging vacation rental investors to illegally churn their properties 52 weeks a year in what were once quiet residential neighborhoods. We greet millions of tourists with a dingy, leaky airport and the Third World ambience of Nimitz Highway, and convince ourselves that it’s OK because they still keep coming.

And then, everyone’s favorite local abomination: the rail project. Ground was broken and concrete poured before anybody with a calculator and an engineering degree figured out how much the thing might cost. Politicians strapped on their wing suits and went soaring off those elevated tracks before they were even built. A few went splat, but some are still climbing, still jumping, still running off unharmed and giddy.

As for the young men parachuting into a Kakaako parking lot at 11 o’clock on a Friday night, I asked around and got shrugs and, “Yeah, they do that sometimes,” and explanations of BASE jumping, an extreme sport that involves leaping off a tall building wearing a wing suit or a parachute — not safe, not permitted, not advisable, but if you’re the sort who needs to cheat death, break rules, slip the surly bonds and so forth, apparently Hawaii is a great place to do it.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.