The Urgency of these Times

The homeless (hopeless) situation in Hawaii is the urgent challenge of the times in Hawaii -- which is just being ignored and denied, hoping the problem will solve itself or just go away.

That is the problem resolution skills taught in the culture (schools) of Hawaii to only solve the problems of one hundred or a thousand years ago -- hoping that history will finally repeat itself and they'll know what to do, because the education is not preparing to meet the challenges of the present.

That is a totally useless education -- designed for the 19th century, when very few people were educated and informed -- which was also the great opportunity for the newspapers and book publishers of that time, who are now failing to respond to the present, and only hoping their glorious past will return, and they can once again become influential and important people.

Instead, all the money is tied up in those obsolete jobs of which the federal employee being paid over $100,000 to do what doesn't need doing, is just the most obvious example -- of which somebody (probably his lawyer or publicist) is trying to sell as his great "public service" -- like all the teachers teaching an education that is failing their students.

All that money is reserved for solving problems that should have been solved one hundred years ago -- but is just perpetuated, so there is no money available to solve actual problems of these times, and they don't want to learn anything else, because frankly, their education doesn't allow them to either.

Because obviously, the function of government is to solve the great problems of the present -- whether that be terrorism, an environmental catastrophe, homelessness, and joblessness, and the greater lack of meaning and purpose of what is worthwhile and what is just going through the motions and getting paid for a sham.

People don't know what to do except what has always been done before -- even though the world has changed so drastically as to pose a whole new set of problems that now need to be solved -- and not just perpetuating the old institutions, as they lobby for even more funds. The present reality is that many children come to school now with the education a person took a long time to acquire previously -- because they didn't have those resources of all the information, and to all the knowledgeable people in the world, as they do as a fact of growing up in these times. Not being informed, is almost an impossibility -- and one has to learn new things daily, and not just for 12 or 20 years, and then need not learn anything more but can then just teach for the rest of their lives -- and lobby for more as their primary function.

The future under those circumstances is indeed bleak -- because you need to free up all those government workers doing what no longer needs doing, to do that which is urgently needed to be done NOW -- which is best said in a previous letter to the editor in the Honolulu newspaper a few days ago (June 5, 2010) by one of the most perceptive minds in the Islands among the many who are ignored in favor of the mass media manipulators who convince people that the reality is the opposite of what you are actually experiencing.

Roxy Berlin:
"It would be reasonable to establish a temporary tent city for Hawaiians on some Hawaiian Homelands property, where people could live within the law, develop a community, share cultural values and have a center for education and social services."

Present day Hawaii is not unlike Iraq and Afghanistan -- which has to rebuild their entire countries from scratch, into the modern world, and not simply build more elaborate palaces and monuments to commemorate their great traditions of the past, which they vainly hope will return them to the heights of glory and civilization.