The Beginning of the End

I hope it doesn’t take a hurricane of biblical proportions for Hawaii to move into the 21st century -- but societies and cultures have a poor track record of evolving willingly. Usually it requires the Hand of God to get them moving in the right direction.

There’s a lot of inertia in the Islands. The media, schools, even the University promotes it. They even claim history merely repeats itself mindlessly and hopelessly -- rather than evolving intelligently. It is even fashionable in these times for the universities, of all places, to teach the despair in human will and ability to improve. Then what are they there for and what do they have of value to teach?

The major sources of traditional information seem unwittingly determined to undermine their own function and purpose. The newspapers no longer even make a pretense of objectivity anymore but are openly partisan and self-serving. In interviewing experts on the education problem, you never see them ask the headmaster of Punahou or Iolani or Mid-Pacific as the cutting edge thoughts on successfully achieving it. No, they interview the HSTA president, whose only solution for everything is more pay for the teachers -- so he can have more pay for himself!

And then the newspaper reporter will defend the next day, that according to studies provided by another union lobbyist, the pay for nurses in Hawaii are the highest in the nation -- but adjusted for the cost-of-living (union provided), is really the lowest in the nation. It reminds one of the years of the previous administration in which anytime a study came out showing Hawaii’s educational performance to be the lowest, the governor or the union would make an “adjustment for Hawaii,” that showed them at the top of the performance charts. And instead of challenging such outrageous assertions, the newspapers would be spreading the good news.

And so they became worthless -- as sources of credible and intelligent information, and in fact, one was likely to be less well-informed -- but misinformed, disinformed and ignorant by consulting those sources. The one area that should never be unionized is the media, schools and universities, because they should be the sources of independent and objective information -- and not a tight circle promoting their own narrow self-interests. That is the beginning of the end.