The following comment, left by someone using the name “a town without a newspaper,” struck me as particularly provocative.
Knowing that not everyone compulsively digs through the daily comments, I thought it deserved highlighting.
Let me know what you think.
Sep 14, 2011 at 10:00 am (Edit)
I once saw a presentation at the UHM for journalism majors. The adviser to the student newspaper Ka Leo explained that if a public official dodges a reporter, the reporter is to look up that official’s home residence address and that evening wait in the drive way to confront the official.
The whole room fell dead silent.
Finally, a young woman spoke out with trepidation, “Can we do that?”
The journalist got angry and started shouting at the students “You are reporters! That’s what reporters are supposed to do!”
I knew one of the student journalists, who was from the midwest but went to high school in Hawaii. She said that in the midwest, people are very nice and considerate in interpersonal matters. They are careful not to say anything that will hurt someone’s feelings. But in practical matters like business and politics, people in the midwest are very firmly but politely assertive and very open — and very hard working. I think that she had a real problem with the absence in Hawaii of that open and assertive side of life, but also with a kind of laid-back negligence and sloppiness.
There is a small-town lifestyle in Hawaii like in the midwestern US, but the geographic isolation amplifies the considerateness of the people, but also their timidity and complacency. They want to become journalists so they can report on restaurants and info tech and baby showers and all the creature comforts that comprise daily life within a very narrow horizon. In the 21st century, this is a path to doom.
The presentation that followed was from a successful journalist, a young guy from the Philippines whose father was a newspaper publisher. (He spoke perfect American English.) This reporter had moved to California during his college years and went to a community college with a decent student newspaper. He bought a Dodge Dart and lived in it, and survived on a diet of crackers and water. He constantly published and built up a big portfolio and got a job as a journalist when he graduated. You don’t need to go to Harvard, he said, but you need to constantly publish.
Again the room was dead silent.
The whole idea of moving to another country and living in an old car and on a diet of crackers and doing nothing but working was totally alien to the UH journalism majors. They probably mostly lived with their families and spent their weekends shopping or at the beach or working at a job (largely so they could go shopping).
The thing is, this guy was from a laid-back tropical island culture, and this guy had some major balls on him. There are people like that in all small-towns, people like Barack Obama, who end up at elite universities and in Hollywood and on Wall Street, etc.
Those kind of people deep down still remain attached emotionally to where they come from, and they keep the values of the culture they were raised in close to their hearts. That’s especially true of people from the midwest, from what I’ve seen.
But that’s not true of Hawaii. Over-achievers from Hawaii do not identify with Hawaii. They grow up alienated from the local culture and it mystifies them. They may visit Hawaii on occasion, but they avoid the people.
If there is a side of life involving openness and assertiveness and hard work and aspiration that is freakishly missing in Hawaii even for someone from rural Ohio who went to public high school in Hawaii, just imagine what Obama thinks of Hawaii.
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I was really going to let one rip here in response to your post, but after consideration, I decided I had better shut up for my own good. 🙂
I from originally from Hawaii but am now on the mainland after getting my college degrees and graduate degrees. The term “plantation mentality” is another pejorative for those who cannot adapt to and understand that local people have very different ways of handling conflict, communicating, understanding time, space, nature, & history and have different core values or prioritize these values in different ways. If you cannot acculturate, it’s YOUR problem.
Plantation mentality is alive in Hawaii. T We still have the environment where when a luna tells a group to jump, all they ask is “how high?”.
Would you venture to guess where and what this may be?
If ya don’t like Hawai’i, get da hell outta Dodge, then. Too many move here and commence complaining: Oh it’s not at all like the mainland. I can’t speed! get outta my way! What’s this local culture thing anyway? How can I destroy it quicker?
actually, I believe that it is very few that move here and then start complaining — most get the message early on to just keep their mouth shut — and what a loss that is for the self-anointed leaders of the local people who have lost another opportunity to tell haole to go home
So …… human beings should simply run away from problems, rather than talk about them and improve upon them?
Wow, I wonder how bad things would be in such a world for billions of people? For starters, most of us would be slaves to the powerful or dying at young ages in a third world culture. No thanks.
The old “if you don’t like it leave” defense is worthless. Yet, some people use it when they have no better argument. Oh well.
In the last presidential election, the state’s largest newspaper declined to make a candidate endorsement for the first time since long before statehood. The paper made no announcement, and offered no explanation.
When queried about the odd situation by the competition, the paper’s top editor publicly lied about the reasons behind it, or so believes just about everyone who took notice. And still, the paper made no announcement of its own to readers or the general community.
And that was the end of it. The community just shrugged it off, as did all the other news media after a single report, even though this was the first time a Hawaii-born candidate was in the serious running (and, of course, won).
That all says quite a bit about Hawaii’s media and community culture.
I’ll shut up and go away now so as not to upset anyone.
I have only been here for 60 years, I traveled elsewhere but always returned so I gave up. I leave occasionally with great reluctance. I recently was in Western New York and spoke with a high school sophomore who lives in a small town. She related how out of place she felt because of the anti intellectual consciousness of her classmates. They, she said, will stay in the area, remain impoverished and happy about it. She on the other hand had her eyes on a higher prize; education and moving on to a City… It is not exclusive to Hawaii: localism is all over the place.
I am always amazed to hear bad luck stories from people who have recently moved here. In recent years I have taken to advising people if they just don’t “get” the place that they are probably better off returning to where they came from.
Also, if things were less expensive, more people would move here. One of the truisms is we all must pay the price of paradise. A really nice house can be had in Buffalo for $120K or so, but who wants to live in Buffalo?
In all fairness, I think that what we might have as a problem in talking about the pros and cons of Hawaii’s “small-town” culture is the consequence of the “(Mainland) Boy(s) Who Cried Wolf”.
We might distinguish between 1) objective critique and 2) constructive criticism and 3) complaint.
Americans are pretty famous worldwide for their complaining — specifically, their constant complaint when abroad “Why can’t this place be more like the States?”
This goes in hand with a belief that deep within every foreigner there is an American crawling to get out. “All these foreigners want to be like us, and we’re gonna help them get there.”
I know of somebody in Honolulu who lives in an apartment building that recently installed security doors. Immediately the mainland transplants living in the building set up a howl, “Why this inconvenience?! I like having an open building. And why do I have to pay for these doors?” So it was agreed that the doors would only be closed and locked at night. Of course, it was the same mainlanders who went out of their way to close and lock the doors during the day. “Why buy something if you aren’t going to use it? That’s dumb.” To them, they are making a rational argument, but in context, it is contradictory and very irrational. But that’s what a culture is: something that seems rational to participants but is peculiar to outsiders.
Maybe with this financial meltdown, the whole world has built up antibodies to the infection of American complaining (the way all these once-colonized developing countries built up a resistance to British and French colonizers who were always complaining “Why can’t India/China/Ireland be more like England?” in the face of the carnage of WWII). Recently, the US government offered to provide advice to Europe on how to deal with debt, and the EU declined to listen to it. Who needs that self-righteous hypocrisy?
Likewise, in Hawaii, when there is an objective critique or constructive criticism, it can be attacked as yet more complaining. This is like when the bodies defenses attack the body itself, not foreign invaders. Then you have a big problem, because good policies and even morality require critique and criticism.
Thanks for high-lighting the comment, Ian.
Whoever wrote it hit the nail on the head. The only thing the author left out was the rampant racism in Hawaii. The Southern Poverty Law Center cites Hawai’i as racist.
It seems implausible that Hawaii citizens are less inquisitive or probing than the rest of the nation. Our country began two optional wars with very little questioning or scrutiny from our mainstream media. I remember Phil Donahue program on MSNBC before the Iraq invasion where he focused on the legitimacy and necessity of the Iraq War. What happened? His program was cancelled just before the attack on Iraq. We now know the network did not want to challenge the government in its assessment to go to war or be at odds with the Bush 43 administration. That is an example of a weak democracy, not a strong one.
In “The Sycophantic Culture” I tried to show what has occurred to our culture, which appears to have deteriorated ethically, for honesty in national affairs seldom has a role, for facts are discarded or new facts concocted like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Many people need a reminder of the infamous 2007 Waikele beating. The vicious assault provides little support for the old “if you don’t like it then leave” attitude.
Guilty plea planned in notorious attack
By Debra Barayuga
dbarayuga@starbulletin.com
A Waianae man was expected to plead guilty today to assaulting a military couple after a minor traffic incident in a parking lot at the Waikele Center.
Gerald D. Paakaula, 44, was set to go to trial on Monday on two second-degree assault charges and being an accomplice to second-degree assault in the Feb. 19 incident. Staff Sgt. Andrew Dussell, 26, and wife Dawn Dussell, 23, suffered concussions and facial fractures.
The confrontation attracted national attention because of its racial overtones.
Paakaula’s 16-year-old son was heard confronting Andrew Dussell, calling him a “f—-g haole” after Dussell’s Durango attempted to pull into a parking stall and accidentally struck the Paakaulas’ Chevy.
Local and nonlocal residents expressed disgust and embarrassment over the use of racial profanity and the brutality of the assault, which occurred during daylight hours. The altercation drew a crowd fronting the complex that houses Party City, Jurison’s Inn and Subway.
Paakaula was accused of engaging in reckless conduct — punching Dussell in the throat, causing him to fall to the ground, and punching Dawn Dussell in the face, picking her off her feet and slamming her to the ground, knocking her momentarily unconscious. The couple’s 3-year-old was in the back seat of their sport utility vehicle.
Paakaula was exiting Baskin Robbins when he saw his wife struggling with Dawn Dussell and jumped in, believing his family was under siege, the defense had said earlier. They say they regret what happened but that Dawn Dussell provoked the physical confrontation by striking their son.
Despite the racial epithets, prosecutors did not characterize the incident as a hate crime because the traffic accident is what triggered the violence. The Paakaulas maintain that the assault had nothing to do with the couple being Caucasian.
Second-degree assault is a Class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Paakaula has a 2002 conviction for beating his son for misbehaving in school.
“The old “if you don’t like it leave” defense is worthless. Yet, some people use it when they have no better argument. Oh well.”
Some locals don’t wanna hear foreigners come here and expect “better argument”, complaining and whining. Go away if you don’t like it here and expect argumentation.
Bob Jones submitted the following via email:
–just imagine what Obama thinks of Hawaii.
With the help of a profile by Todd Purdum in the March, 2008, issue of Vanity Fair, I think we have some clues:
“Barack Hussein Obama owes his very existence to a defiance of conventional odds. He was born and came of age in Hawaii, the 50th state and in many ways among the freest-thinking, where mixed-race ancestry is such a given that residents refer to their own backgrounds as “chop suey” or “poi dog,” where hotel-room bureau drawers hold not only the Gideon Bible but the Book of Mormon and the Teachings of the Buddha, and where bumper stickers urge, WAG MORE, BARK LESS. If Obama comes across as a bit of a softy—if you don’t see the toughness or the ambition at first—it may be in part because he spent his formative years in a place where “Live Aloha” had not yet become a slogan aimed at recapturing a more gracious time, but was simply a way of life.”
Someone named George Berish left the following comment in Civil Beat back in February:
http://www.civilbeat.com/comments/9258/
———————–
“In case anyone missed it, here’s how Obama dealt with Hawaii when he addressed the Olympic Site Selection committee – with the attention of international TV riveted on his presentation:”
From: Chicago 2016: Obama Olympics speech in Copenhagen.
http://www.inewscatcher.com/2009/10/o…
—–
“… I was born in Hawaii. I lived in Indonesia for a time. I never really had roots in any one place or culture or ethnic group. And then I came to Chicago … a city where I finally found a home.”
(I fear that when it comes to Obama, there are those in Hawaii who might be taking credit where credit is not due — to say the least.)
Yikes. Thanks! That can explain a lot. But, still, a black man in the White House? That’s probably a lot more about the mainlander racism. Sad.
“Pesky peddlers” hmmm? And the”The state” is the poster child for organizations that run things well. We need more rules and big brother gummint. maaan oh man.
“Does Hawaii’s small-town cultural style inhibit openness and assertiveness?”
Yes I think so, to the original question. I don’t know if this will be continue to be true as more people migrate here from elsewhere and as people originally from the islands return home after experiencing places where more people are likely to speak/act.
The Urbanophile by Aaron Renn is one of the blogs that considers the effects of boomerang migration (with bonus points for the reference to Thomas Hardy): http://www.urbanophile.com/2011/04/28/replay-the-return-of-the-native/
Some great comments here… Best when we avoid the polarization trap. Culture and behaviors can be both a strength and a weakness depending on scale and application. In interpersonal interactions certainly politeness, respect, tolerance and non-confrontation can be appreciated. But when a society or a body politic adopt those traits as standard operating mode while an oligarchy, empire, religion or large corporate interest dissects their communities for development, gentrification or displacement, well maybe not so good.
When traveling to the mainland with artists, formerly local people come out of the woodwork to get a taste of their former homeland. Young people with ambition leave in droves. Look at the gaps in demographics, see the under 45s living in their parents house just to stay.
Yes Hawaii is special and much to preserve. Many, whether born here or driftwood, love the personal values and cultural diversity, but fight very hard for equality and the environment that need help so that the islands can remain or again become a place of local integrity and style and not just an exploitable chunk of real estate. While one’s relationship with the establishment power interests often dictates the extent one perceives the need for progressive change or preservation or the ability to act on it, quality of life will require people of creativity, dedication and passion to stand for things that positively shape the character of our society.
Wherever they come from, let’s hope there is room left for integrity, activism and art lest we become just at last a destination of resort and no local character or values. Passivity will not help to create a great future. So be respectful on personal levels but organize and stand up against things that distort the island’s best.
Amen to the need for building community, consensus, and organizing to attain progressive ends. The lesson of 1954 is still valid