This popped up on my YouTube channel, reminding me to mourn.
Maui was my favorite island. Was, because, whether we admit it or not, the Valley Isle is dead. Avarice killed it, as it killed the Gathering Place (Oahu), the Garden Isle (Kauai), the Pineapple Isle (Lanai), and soon, the Big Island.
American businessmen, with the cooperation of the government, imprisoned Hawaii’s own Queen Liliʻuokalani and threatened her with the one bargaining chip they knew would work: her beloved people.
Ever since the United States government took what wasn’t theirs, out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, this kind of rape has continued unabated.
Businessmen call it progress, room for one more.
But we know the truth.
We duly watch the hired help imitate a reasonable facsimile of ancient hula, piss in the warm waters of Waikiki beach, line up for the latest social media trend, and check out of our expensive hotel rooms — feeling a vague sense of uneasiness and a twinge of guilt.
Then we’re off, back to our suburban lives, without a backward glance.
Like a dirty one-night stand…
There’s always a part of me willfully holding on, picking open the scabs, looking back, despite an abuse survivor’s instinct for denial, rationalization…the inevitable, “Where do I belong, then?”
Right or wrong, I was there — for work, my honeymoon, to show our only child the beach in Kaanapali, to bask in what remained of the famously touted (and abused) Aloha spirit.
I have those precious, stolen memories — pictures, postcards and souvenirs — even if, maybe, I should never have been there in the first place, adding to the pain.
I should’ve known better, as a (date) rape/trauma/abuse survivor, to leave well enough alone, to advocate for sovereignty at any cost, to do my part to save the ʻĀina and its native people.
People forget…a week, seven months after a disaster…and they move onto the next. They have to. Otherwise, they’d go mad. They’d have nothing left for themselves to hold onto, not their sanity nor their compassion.
What happened to Maui is beyond a travesty. What happened is happening still, in the local gov.’s joke of a clean-up.
Their only consideration has always been what’s best for the tourist dollar. To the victor go the spoils. Whatever will get me elected, whatever sells. Nothing ever changes.
Nobody bothers to stop and stand in the graciousness of the plumeria tradewinds, and consider the true meaning of Aloha.
It’s not about the grab-and-go of what’s yours or mine, or climbing that economic ladder to the end of the rainbow, where finder’s keepers.
Or holding on too long to what once belonged to everyone, regardless of that economic status…rich, middle class, poor.
The after-effects of the Aug. 8, 2023 wildfires will continue consuming Maui until there is nothing left but series of smart cities for the elite, those who can afford the price of paradise, and the ashes of the forgotten.
But maybe the book was written on that lot a long time ago, back to a time when one of the greatest queens abdicated her throne at gunpoint for pennies on the dollar.
Right now, I can’t — I don’t have the right.
I will mourn later…
Wailuku Rain
a parade goes by
I walk to the rides and the smells of a school carnival
only thinking of my sore legs, summer sweat mingling with the Wailuku rain, the clouds will wait for the day the world stopped to watch and point and stare at broken mountaintop ashes of our beloved, instead…the dog who lost its way, a child’s brick ‘n mortar lying besides a favorite bike, wheels spinning, the newlyweds who will celebrate forever in the crook of this burnt seawall, where multi-hued tourists once oohed and aahed over a cheeseburger in paradise
what would I say to myself then, if I knew? what would I have done, in between bites of my quarter pounder and melted shave ice?
go, ka … ka ka ka…
you have laundry, and a family that needs feeding, a dog of your own to walk beneath the raindrops of this sunny, but borrowed template, far removed from the fulcrum of a writer’s daydream messiah in the sky