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It's That Word Again...
By lindamuralidharan on 2020-06-05 07:12:44
Yes, "interconnectedness" is going to keep slapping us in the face until we pay attention. Whether we talk about the low
value of African American family wealth in this county in comparison to white family wealth, or another dead black man
executed by police in the field ("extrajudicial killing", I think is the fancy word), the higher mortality rate of nonwhite
infants compared to white infants, the higher mortality rate of nonwhite mothers during, before and just after pregnancy, the
difficulty voters in areas with a preponderance of black voters have in voting, or the rate at which lower income white and
black young people are recruited into the military and then trained into thinking it's okay to impose our will on and kill
people whose governments we don't like (these "people" almost never have the intention to physically attack the United
States), all forces and underlying causation are related. [caption id="attachment_14160" align="alignright" width="157"]
Philando Castile, shot dead by police[/caption] I was really struck the other day by the contrast
between two opinion pieces printed in our local paper, one right above the other, with opposite views of how to improve
American lives in general and in response to the economic devastation of covoid-19 in particular. As many know, Hawaii
has had relatively few cases of covid-19 and of deaths from that virus. On the other hand, our foolish, decades long policy
of encouraging tourism at the expense of expanding other industries, has meant our rates of hungry families, unemployment,
and economic misery are among the worst in the country. Tourism has ground to an astounding halt because of a 14 day
quarantine each arriving tourist must undergo. All one writer, the head of the Hawaiian Republican Party Shirlene
DeLaCruz Ostrov, could propose...after giving lip service to the great job health care workers and citizens in Hawaii have
done to limit the community spread of Covid-19...was jobs, jobs, jobs. She made no mention of how the majority of these
jobs would be both low wage and low benefit jobs with no provision for child care or paid sick leave. Many of these jobs
are in effect part time when and if they come back at a pace that she wants by lifting as many virus safeguards as she would
like. They surely do benefit the establishment that likes to keep workers in line and have a ready supply of cheap labor.
And the public is lulled into complacency because full employment and the tourist dollars help pay taxes for running the
state and for services that middle class folks like. Although our policing and public education have begun to improve in
recent years only and our criminal justice system, mental health system, and roads are in shambles, largely because of
lackadaisical governance. Some of us have spent a lot of time urging the powers that be to diversify our sources of revenue
for individuals as well as for state and local government. And yet, short sighted and I must say rather greedy people avoid it
by sins of either omission or commission. We have a major activity waiting to go called the Thirty Meter Telescope. It
would bring a modest number of jobs to an area where merchants and families already were limited in their prosperity on the
Island of Hawaii or the Big Island as we call it even before the pandemic. A majority of Native Hawaiians and other
residents of the state wanted it built especially after it survived many court challenges. A minority of people fought it
blocked roads tried to set up additional legal challenges and somehow intimidated our lack luster governor. (He ranks pretty
low among governors across the country in customer satisfaction on a number of grounds.) But nothing is done to
implement the law. Post Covid-19 polls show the majority in favor of the TMT has increased both within and without the
Native Hawaiian community. A number of Hawaiian cultural practitioners and experts have said that the religion some
claim to protect the mountain where the TMT would be built was officially eliminated by an Hawaiian king ages ago and
others have explained that even those that revere the mountain know that commercial activity was practiced there in the old
days. They see little reason to block a program that would do wonders for Hawaiian reputations and the world's knowledge
(tourists who come here gravitate to all the grass skirt and grass hut souvenirs as though those represent "Hawaii" and its
true culture). Few know how gigantically skilled the ancient Hawaiians were at understanding the stars and navigating vast
oceanic reaches by knowledge of the stars. Astronomy is their heritage. The TMT sponsors are already donating sums to
help the underserved areas of Hawaiian children many of whom are Polynesian with STEM programs in the schools.
Additional moneys from an official TMT construction would help the underserved people with health care and social
services that intervene to help strengthen families that centuries of neglect and exploitation mean that disproportionate
numbers of Polynesian families suffer from alcoholism and members in jail or prison. The white missionaries who came
here in the early 19th Century brought a few benefits but terrible destruction. They condemned much of Hawaiian culture,
made people feel ashamed of their bodies and put them to work on plantations in conditions totally alien to the people of the
islands. The people were hard workers but they worked with the rhythm of the land and the winds and tides. They built fish
ponds using natural irrigation. They depended largely on the fish and taro fields, native nuts, and fruit. All these could be
tended without recourse to working for plantation owners who wanted a profit from the Hawaiians working long days in hot
fields. The missionary descendants took possession of much of the land and exploited many business opportunities to enrich
themselves without sharing that wealth with the Hawaiian commoners. Many Hawaiians died from the harshness and
unaccustomed labor in the cane and pineapple fields. And of course the white people brought disease for which the
Hawaiians were not immune. And later, it was a variety of the missionary descendants and others who decided to strip
Hawaii from self-government under their queen and made Hawaii a US territory without any vote or desire from the
Hawaiians themselves. [caption id="attachment_ 14161" align="alignright" width="570"]
=
Diversity
is WG
arm Excuse For =
Racism =
M8) Efforts to hold minorities from
advancing[/caption] Perhaps you can see an interconnectedness here with the African American experience on the main
land. Their culture destroyed. Lies told about their personal and family behaviors. Exploited in brutal field conditions for
the profits of the owners. And we have Native Americans who were physically punished for speaking their own languages
in boarding schools that were supposed to "help" them. I heard a man recently say he was physically punished in the L.A.
schools system for speaking Spanish when he was a child. I don't remember exactly how old he seemed but I believe he
was in his late fifties or early sixties. I know a Native Hawaiian woman who works where I volunteer....my guess she is
between 55 and 60 in age....who remembers herself being punished for speaking Hawaiian at school. Mind you, that was in
an era when French and German and Spanish (Castilian, perhaps?) were taught as academic subjects for (white) kids in
typical American public schools. Not that the inner city Hispanic kids had access to these schools or such academic
curricula. You can go to New Zealand and study the colonial impact on the Maori. You can got to Australia and study the
white imperial impact on the Aborigines. In America and elsewhere....and this does not excuse oppression on other
continents or by other ethnic groups towards many weaker communities...we know the results of the imperialistic terrorism
of indigenous cultures and their people mean that today people from these ethnic groups have lower rates of education, good
health care, employment, accumulation of wealth in the form of home ownership, and in participation in higher levels of
corporate and government positions. [caption id="attachment_14162" align="alignleft" width="100" |i" == Image
from the movie "Twelve Years a Slave"[/caption] Consequently today we have infant and maternal mortality rates rising
faster among people of color than among white people. Yes, we are a neglectful society so while funds and programs are
cut, we no longer have an enviable health system and now we no longer have a declining rate in infant and maternal
mortality. [caption id="attachment_14163" align="alignleft" width="189"] 2 Medgar Evers, shot
as a martyr for justice[/caption] As we protest the police murder of George Floyd we see how it has been a conscious and
unconscious desire on the part of powers that be to keep black people in line. Some of this is just plain bigotry. Some
people whom I know personally don't like black people and especially don't like to see them in positions of responsibility.
Uppity blacks, uppity women and so forth. Police brutality is both a means to an end and the result of attitudes toward black
and brown people. In Hawaii it is largely sins of omission plus snobbery. We do not spend adequately or assign competent
people to redress the wrongs of the past that have left many Native Hawaiian in marginal economic conditions and with
fractured families and culture....neither positive in terms of integration with the larger culture nor in tune with the tradition
of their inherited culture. There is little direct discrimination toward any group (except the recently arrived Micronesians)
but the middle and upper classes do look down judgmentally at aspects of life in the Polynesian communities who are not
adequately represented in the seats of power. White people are not our only dominant group.. For example many of the
Japanese who immigrated here came with an intact culture and appreciation for education so they rose up out of the
plantations and have become successful in many types of endeavors from the trades to small business ownership to
academia to government leadership. [caption id="attachment_14164" align="alignnone" width="284"]
Pearl Harbor Shipyard[/caption] The second article which was published on the
same page with the chair of the Republican Party, takes a very different tack, and I believe he (and many others speaking out
lately) are urging something really basic to preserving our democracy and a decent standard of living for Americans in
general. This man is a Navy veteran and former commander of the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard (our largest single
employer in Hawaii). He champions a more egalitarian way of conducting our country and our government. He lobbies for
major increases in pay for the many who toil on our behalf (but are underpaid and overworked), health care workers, hotel
workers, delivery drivers, teachers.....we could go on and on. And here in Hawaii we are very short of both doctors and
teachers. He wants all to have adequate health care (poor health is, after all, related to poor income if you are not among the
upper 20% of Americans in terms of wealth), respect and promotion of science, especially that which helps us fight disease
and pandemics (which, again, hurt the low income and marginal groups the most). He is very clear we can have a graduated
income tax similar to what worked so well back in the day. He did not say it, but I suspect we need to claw back some of the
tax breaks that were give to the very wealth in the last major Federal tax bill. The money is there. We simply need to use it.
And then, low and behold, we will have jobs....for infrastructure, more special needs teachers, for small classrooms....and
the job security and better wages will lead to more jobs as people can afford to buy bikes for their kids and newer washing
machines and better tents for their camping vacations and healthier food, and, and..... You can call it a new Marshall Plan for
domestic use. You can call it the New Deal II. You can call it the Great Society Revisited. You can call it the 21st Century
Awakening. You can call it anything you want but if we do not do it, we will sink further and further into the ranks of
second rate nations. Spending money to benefit the lives of the majority of people has been shown to work. The
opposite....shoving lots of cash and special tax loopholes at corporations and very rich just makes matters worse or a related
pet plan of people on the right, austerity does not work either.. Only in recent years did I learn that having a permanent
underclass.....white and black...was the design of our particular form of capitalism from colonial times on and something we
pretty much inherited from England. Which kept sending over here as much of their underclass as they could. I reckon at
least one of my ancestors was an indentured servant or a convict. [caption id="attachment_14165" align="alignright"
width="179"] Human Rights Leader[/caption] Now I am a little more aware that what my
parents taught, about poor people being shiftless, irresponsible, and possessed of very bad values and habits, was part of
years of ongoing propaganda and mythologizing. Although they were not prejudiced against black people in particular, they
did look down on poor whites, poor anybodies, and Italian immigrants. It didn't take me long into young adulthood to
realize these were false beliefs but I didn't see the institutionalization of that thinking which has hurt black people the most.
It took a very, very bloody war for Lincoln to free the slaves. The dreadful and disguising destruction of black and other
inner city neighborhoods (by a small minority of "protestors") this last week pales in comparison if it is the price we pay to
get our collective knees off the necks of black people in America and at the same time benefit all of society. We are all
interconnected both in the negative patterns we support and in the positive gains we can and will make.
