Lee Cataluna: Focus on getting better rather than getting back

Some people are saying — carefully, as though bracing for blowback — that Hawaii is actually greatly improved with so few tourists here crowding every little corner of the islands and pushing their way around.

Others aren’t even being careful about it. They’re just flat-out loud and proud about beaches finally being enjoyed by the people who live here, skies finally free of the noise of tour helicopters and traffic being so much more sane.

Another thing COVID-19 has laid bare is the deep ambivalence Hawaii feels about tourism. It’s never been a secret that Hawaii residents smile through their teeth about the whole sordid “sell paradise” industry. It’s a way to make a living for many people. It’s a way to make a killing for a few.

Or maybe ambivalence, defined as mixed feelings or contradictory ideas, isn’t the right word. Maybe the feeling isn’t mixed at all. Even people who make their money off the tourism industry were getting the uneasy feeling that it was all becoming terribly out of control, with more and more people tumbling off the planes and staying in cheap rooms far outside the tourism districts and spending next to nothing while they light bonfires on the beach and take danger- selfies on closed trails.

But right now we’re standing at the point where things could go in a different direction.

The worst thing of all would be to aim at 10 million visitors a year as the long-term goal or as the mark of “full recovery.” That’s like an obese patient surviving a heart attack and setting their sights on getting right back to gluttonous habits. “Recovery” needs to mean moving forward to something new and healthy, not going back to the way things were, because that was bad.

Tourism made us sick. The virus flew here from elsewhere. That poor Waikiki bartender who became the most personalized case of COVID-19 in Hawaii, languishing in a coma while his sweet mom cried about wanting to cook Filipino food for him, he probably got sick on the job from a tourist who brought the virus with them on their Hawaii vacation.

But even before the new coronavirus, tourism was making Hawaii sick. The damage to coral at Hanauma Bay. The sunscreen that bleached out the reefs. The beaches they sell to build their hotels. The trade-off has always been money versus health, whether it’s the health of the ocean, the aina, the people or the way of life.

The only way Hawaii can “get back” its economy is to open up to the virus again. But the goal should not be to get back, but instead to get balanced.

If this total implosion of the state’s economy doesn’t inspire a change in the way Hawaii values its own well-being, then maybe nothing will, and we’ll keep charging right to the ugly end when Hawaii becomes so cheap and degraded that even the bargain hunters don’t want to come here anymore. Recovery should be toward health.

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