All Is Lost

New Hawaii governor, Neil Abercrombie, has already made his signature move -- in spending all the emergency (hurricane) relief funds, on what he proclaimed was the great calamity of government worker furloughs.

So one wonders, how do things get worse -- if things don't work out to the sunniest best case scenario of never having any emergencies, or unanticipated expenditures. It's probably the case that a slow slide in real estate values have to accelerate to reflect the added risk of having no insurance nor capacity to meet the challenges of living perilously on the edge -- as though nothing bad could ever happen again.

People forget that previous governor, Linda Lingle, has lived a charmed existence -- and even managed to survive unscathed in an earthquake at ground zero, which is the personal luck she brought to the office and state as the governor -- which then people took for granted that they would always be so lucky, which has not been the case, for the last 30 years, as Hawaii has lived off of its natural advantages, while building nothing to enhance and sustain them.

That would mean doing something as essential as developing the great advantage of abundant sunshine as its great natural resource -- and revitalizing the land, instead of shipping its garbage (or trying to), to somewhere else, as befitting one of the most consumption-oriented, diminishing productivity economies in the world.

So thinking people are right in asking, "What's the plan?", because it was not necessary to have one, to win the election, and since, nothing but glittering generalities and sentiments have been pronounced, while the Cabinet selections, have all been to appoint the foxes to guard the henhouse. That is to say, the lobbyists for the schools, labor, unions, strong, now lead those departments of the state.

Which leads thinking Hawaii to wonder, who provides any checks and balances to runaway government spending mainly to benefit its own government employees -- and then, those politicians they will work to elect. Something has gone horribly wrong in paradise -- but is the predictable outcome of today's self-isolating societies, as well as personalities. They just drift further away from the river of life and commerce -- because it is their choice to do so, until the final isolation of death as its only outcome, and then that pattern is repeated, even by the young people who simply become old in that familiar pattern.

Thus such societies never die, or can be reborn, and transfigured into the more appropriate present response of contemporary lives -- but is a self-isolating backwater culture and society the most dynamic have to escape from. That is quintessentially the "island" problem -- of Haiti, Nauru, Papua, Samoa, and the islands of Micronesia, Melanesia, Philippines, Indonesia -- wonderful escapes from reality, that is actually better than these socialistic-utopian fantasies in which, nobody has to do any work anymore for the rest of their lives, because their welfare is the new entitlement, but they have to give up their freedoms, choices and alternatives, to make that work.

There is no margin for error -- in a state prone to it.