Hawaii

I'm starting to see why people are generally happier when they don't read. I've been reading the local and national news quite a lot as of late, and the state of Hawai'i is next in line for a good ass-chewing.

I can understand why they don't want more resorts built, we already have a TON of them here on Maui, let the tourists pick from the existing ones, there's no need to fuck this place up any more than it already has been. But I have to wonder what these people are thinking when they protest the installation of a solar observatory on top of Haleakala. The mountain was picked from a lengthy list of other locales as the best possible place on earth to install said observatory. The environmental impact from it is minuscule in the grand scheme when compared to the atrocities that the residents commit on their own. They want high-tech industry but the minute some entity is interested they protest the ever loving hell out of it, effectively destroying the possibility of any non-tourism dependent jobs. Most of the high school grads here leave state to go to college, end up with a degree they can't use in Hawai'i and never come back. They bitch about "Haoles" (which is the local term for any non-pacific islander) coming here and taking over, but the people you see littering most are locals, not Haoles. I was sitting at the bus stop one day when a car with some high school age kids (of either asian or islander heritage) drives up and tosses a half full soda out the window of the car and drives away with its occupants laughing. Everyone here owns a car and the businesses around here won't hire you if you ride the public transit lines. I was hired and fired within a 3 day span without ever once working a single hour for the company because I rode the bus. Walking around the streets here you see more broken glass, cigarette butts, and general trash on the ground than I've seen in NYC. NYC is filthy. The only places on Maui that are actually clean are the places the tourists frequent: Lahaina, Kihei, Wailea, Ka'anapali, etc. Everywhere else, good luck trying to find a trash can to put your garbage in, they just don't exist. Maui is also not pedestrian friendly, unless you're in one of the previously mentioned tourist locales. Here in Makawao there's no sidewalks until you get into the downtown shopping district, if you don't own a car, you're walking down the side of the road inches from traffic for almost a mile before the first patch of sidewalk. Now keep in mind that there are a bunch of morbidly obese people here, more than I've seen in just about any other place I've been (and I've been all over the country). If it weren't for the trade winds that blow over the islands constantly this state would probably have a smog problem that would rival places like LA and Hong Kong. Maybe then the people would take note of the fact that driving your car down the fucking block for a can of spam was a waste of gas, and an obscene amount of carbon waste released into the air for a product that no one's quite sure what's in it.

On another topic, there's a movement here to ban cigarettes from the beaches because the smokers here can't seem to understand that kids play on the beaches and will put just about anything in their mouths. I being a smoker, still agree with this, I put my butts in my pocket till I can find a place to throw them away in a proper receptacle. They still allow glass bottles on the beaches though, and on more than one occasion I've nearly stepped on jagged shards that you can barely see in the sand.

For all it's beauty, Hawai'i has a lot of growing to do before they can actually say they "care" about the 'aina. These people refer to themselves as kama'aina which roughly translates to earth children. Would you seriously do this shit to your mother?