By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Staff Writer
The headlines have dominated the front page for four days now. And again today, another story that is being covered around the world.
International attention is fixed on Hawai‘i, on the efforts to explain how the world’s most sophisticated military could have made such horrible mistakes.
But there’s something missing, something that’s hard to explain, hard to name, but it has to do with the connection Hawai‘i people feel to what happened. Or the lack of connection.
When lives are lost on Hawai‘i’s roads, small memorials spring up at the site of the crash. After the tragedies that happened at Xerox and Sacred Falls, the community came to bring lei and say quiet prayers for healing.
But what do we do for the Ehime Maru, or for the crews of the helicopters that crashed last night on the North Shore?
When a child is sick, we line up to give blood. When a natural disaster strikes, we send canned goods or blankets or checks.
What do you send to the families who are hoping for the best and fearing the worst?
There are so many factors that create Hawai‘i’s illusion of distance from these accidents. For a host of complex reasons, the military is felt to be walled off from our local community, and its shame and sorrow is not our own. The doomed crew of the Ehime Maru wasn’t from Hawai‘i, and though we sympathize, of course, it’s not the same raw, wrenching pain as losing people you know. As for the soldiers killed and hurt last night, it’s too soon to know who they were, where they lived, where they were from.
Most of all, it’s hard to know what to do, how to reach out. It’s not a situation where you can send food or blankets or warm clothes and know that you’re making it a little bit better.
But we are already responding to the plight of the families of the Ehime Maru.
Yesterday afternoon, a group of local organizations came together to start a fund for the Ehime Maru and the Uwajima Fisheries High School. The Japan-America Society of Hawaii, Japanese Cultural Center, Japanese Chamber of Commerce,
United Japanese Society of Hawaii and KIKU-TV set up the account at First Hawaiian Bank, and the bank kicked in $10,000 to start it off.
Donations to the Ehime Maru Fund can be made at any First Hawaiian Bank branch. Checks should be made out to Japan-America Society of Hawaii — a nonprofit organization, so contributions are tax-deductible. They also can be mailed to First Hawaiian Bank, P.O. Box 3200, Honolulu, HI 96847.
The fund’s account number is 01-097407.
Writing a check is certainly a disconnected way of expressing concern, but right now it’s the only way we really have to live up to our tradition of caring.
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