What I Want, is Mine; What I Don’t Want, is Yours

One wonders what the standard of value is for communities; is it that every transaction should be judged by the fairness of its exchanges, or is the greater value, getting an unfair exchange, which is the exploitation of one over the other? When one sees the news of the day, one would assume that the latter is the objective in Hawaii, rather than any concept of fairness and equity.

It seems that there is great delight in the community and its greatest celebration of achievement, when others can be manipulated and deceived into bringing as much money into the local economy as possible -- with no expectations or intent to provide any value in return. Those are our proverbial “pork barrel” projects that have become the staple of life in Hawaii -- on which the people gorge, thinking nobody will ever notice them putting on “a few extra pounds,” overconsuming in that manner.

Thus, everybody comes to live in this denial -- that buses, boats, convention centers, housing projects, roads run empty, if they run at all, once they have obtained their federal grants and subsidies.

Such “values” filter down to every aspect and level of life in the Islands. People will sell their cars when they are too dangerous for them to feel comfortable driving them themselves. But the buyer will never know that until too late -- when they find out about that fatal flaw in the accident. Clothes will be “donated” when they are no longer wearable -- in order to take the deduction for their full original cost.

It doesn’t matter that the IRS doesn’t allow such deductions -- because ignorance and misunderstanding of those rules, supersede intent to defraud. “Right,” is whatever one wants them to be -- as is "the truth," so the advantage goes to the most ruthless and unscrupulous for proving the worthiness of their dominance (leadership). “Do unto others before others have a chance to do unto you,” becomes the Golden Rule. Corruption is foremost the inability to make these distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, useful and useless, meaning and meaningless.

So instead of meaningful relationships and meaningful communications, meaninglessness becomes the benchmark -- to render all form and no substance, until finally, the predators realize they are now the prey, and when that happened, they have no idea of how or when.

When the powers that be became the has-beens, is never clear. At one moment, they are riding on top of the world, masters of all they survey, with a monopoly on all the buggy-whip manufacturing capacity, and the next day, nobody can recall why it was once considered so important -- and has now become the standard of jokes by which all things are measured.