Lee Cataluna: Disregard of rules exploding in Hawaii

The danger of the proliferation of illegal fireworks goes beyond injuries and the potential for death, though the risk to life and property is bad enough.

The danger is what it says about Hawaii: that this is a lawless place, a state where rules and laws are made but gleefully ignored, a community where law enforcement is ineffective or, worse, unmotivated, and where contraband can so easily be brought in and widely distributed. It is a place where the black market thrives, patronized by thousands, and where those who would like the law to be followed are bullied into silence with insults like “spoilsport” or “snowflake” or worse.

For at least the last two decades, there have been the annual after-New Year’s discussions about the effects of the illegal fireworks on pets and people with breathing problems.

A point should also be made about the effect the explosions can have on veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Not everyone who served in combat has PTSD, and not everyone who has PTSD is affected by loud sounds, but come on. The long night of flashes, blasts and mortar shells is a lot for many people to take and can be awful for a person suffering from PTSD.

The lawlessness and selfishness of purchasing and lighting illegal fireworks is now extending to the next morning, when piles of red firecracker paper are left behind in gutters and are scattered like drops of blood across streets. Doesn’t anybody sweep up the mess anymore? Doesn’t anybody shoot down the driveway with a hose after the party breaks up? Is that not part of the tradition? To grumble about those things sounds like a grumpy kupuna, but the grumpy kupuna looked after their own messes for the sake of pride and sense of civic duty.

Yes, lighting fireworks on New Year’s is a Hawaii tradition, but the tradition was to hang a string of firecrackers off a branch of the mango tree or from a broomstick on top of a ladder, not to turn the entire island into a thundering war zone.

Or have we made a new tradition in the last 20 years so that the disregard of laws and reckless abandon of New Year’s has become who we are at the heart?

Hawaii has a host of laws that are routinely, blatantly ignored, from the proliferation of “monster” houses that go far beyond building codes to illegal vacation rentals, from cellphone use while driving to the ease and impunity with which thieves are breaking into houses in broad daylight knowing that their chances of being caught are slim at best. So many examples, and it starts every year with a huge, islandwide ritual of blowing up illegal explosives with little worry of being caught, as though rather than warding off evil spirits, the display is an affirmation that Hawaii is the kind of place where you can get away with a lot.