By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer
The room was filled with bureaucrats, planners, government aides and assorted policy wonks. The topics were serious: plotting the state’s future, controlling unsightly growth and designing a better future. Hardly the stuff of comedy.
Yet the visiting expert from the Mainland needed to utter just one line to get everyone laughing: "The secret is getting all your state agencies to work together."
You would have thought it was a young Jerry Seinfeld at Catch A Rising Star. Or maybe Rita Rudner doing a slightly off-color lounge act in Vegas.
The laughter started with bureaucrats, spread to the lawmakers and finally ended up in the community affairs section.
Imagine such a thing! Everyone working together at the state government! What next? The counties joining together, too! What a utopia this guy must live in!
Actually, it was Maryland. And for the next 20 minutes or so Joel Hirschhorn, who works for the National Governors Association, outlined his ideas to help Hawai‘i and the rest of the country come to terms with the way we’re going.
There were some ugly words about the way we’ve done it in the past. Haphazard. Careless. Sprawl. Congestion. There were a lot of better words, too. The New Urbanism. Smart Growth. Sustainability. Mass transit. Communications. What it all adds up to, Hirschhorn said, is this: "You can have all the prosperity, growth and wealth you want, but it doesn’t mean anything if your quality of life is declining."
That seemed to me as succinct a summary of Hawai‘i recent history as any I had heard in a long time.
A few hours later, I read something else that hit the mark, too, in a new book on the culture of islands called "Searching for Crusoe." It includes George Orwell’s famous description of the five facets of a thoroughly despoiled place:
1. One is never alone.
2. One never does anything for one’s self.
3. One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.
4. Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.
5. One is never out of the sound of artificial music.
I don’t know if that accurately describes all of O‘ahu, but it certainly fits the parts I know best.
And then it hit me: What a great place this could be if we could just get all the government agencies in the state working together to make this a better place and fix some of the despoiling that’s already gone on. Heck, someday we might even find our quality of life improving as fast as our economic development.
Go ahead, call me a dreamer. Say it’s utopian. Just don’t laugh now.
Mike Leidemann’s columns appear Thursdays and Saturdays in The Advertiser. He can be reached by phone (525-5460) or e-mail (mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com).
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