Warm Weather Does Not Make a Paradise

If that were true, most of the banana republics in the world would not be located in the tropics with their famously unjust and corrupt governments -- conducted in the oppressive heat and humidity that saps the people’s energies from ever thinking they could make society different. There seems to be some value in at least minimally having to plan to accommodate the challenges of changing climatic and environmental shifts that cause societies to optimize their resources -- instead of taking them for granted, knowing if they simply wait long enough, things will revert back to their “comfort zone.” That complacency may work at first but when populations grow too large and concentrated, those problems can no longer be ignored and tolerated, having gone past the point of no return, and natural self-correction.

At that point, societies have to draw upon the resourcefulness of all their members to solve the critical challenge to their continued viability -- as a culture, to move on to the next level of progress and evolution, or be cast aside like the many others that had its heyday for a short time before the party was over, because it could not rise to any great challenges of its time -- which obviously at this time, is a society that can manage, conserve and share its resources optimally among all its members -- or risk creating a clique of haves and a larger group of have-nots, which is the telltale ending of every once prosperous civilization.

As one reads the concerns of the Honolulu dailies, these battles over still plentiful resources are already beginning to escalate into open warfare -- in which one class of citizens are demanding exclusive use of the sidewalks, parks, schools, revenues, lands, and government itself -- for themselves, for their exclusive enrichment and prosperity as their entitlement, while everybody else has to fend for themselves.

That group of self-selected favorites grows smaller and smaller daily -- while the group expected to support those few in the comfort and luxury they feel they alone are accustomed and entitled to, become ever-increasingly larger, and disenfranchised. At one time, many of these people thought they were inextricably part of that “in”-group, before realizing they were just being played along as pawns for those singular persons riding on top, which is the traditional rule, government and society they were hoping to restore to glory -- with themselves at the top.

Whether we call them royalty, “liberals,” or democrats, doesn’t make much difference because the motivation is the same -- to establish themselves as the elites in any society, with permanent privileges over everybody else in society, because they are so much smarter and deserving than all the others.