Big bucks wasted on city's show of force

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Well, better safe than sorry, eh?

We're safe, all right. We're so darn safe that some of us are sorry.

We spent somewhere between $2 million and $7 million on this?

A few hundred protesters who had more aloha than animosity?

We turned our glorious Ala Moana Park into a staging area for every anagrammed paramilitary force in the state — HPD, HFD, DPS, EMT, DOT, SWAT, SCUBA and who knows what else — to control a crowd that couldn't fill some conference rooms in town?

We used concrete barriers, metal detectors, roadblocks, no-parking signs, electronic warnings, sky-cams and coned-off lanes that gave our streets the look of a Beirut embassy just so demonstrators wouldn't cause any disruptions to the normal flow of things?

Talk about stepping through the looking glass. Curiouser and curiouser!

"We want to be visible yet invisible," said the king, I mean, chief of police. (The real Humpty Dumpty once said: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.")

In a way, nothing validates the concerns about what globalization is doing to us so much as the show of force we felt compelled to produce this week to provide security for those attending the Asian Development Bank meeting at the Hawai'i Convention Center.

But who the heck are we protecting, anyway? Was it the ADB delegates? Was it the residents?

Or was it our own greedy financial interests, the ones that will drive us to keep bringing ever bigger meetings, and ever greater security forces, into our Aloha State?

Wouldn't it be better if we had leaders in the forefront of new economic and personal thinking instead of those who buy into the same old pattern of development and waste?

You have to wonder what some poor villager in Bangladesh or Vietnam would make of our spending several million dollars on the safety of a relative handful of well-off bureaucrats when their needs are so much more real and pressing.

Imagine what those millions of dollars could have done in a rural school in Thailand or Nepal.

For that matter, imagine how that money could have been better spent in our own schools from Waimanalo to Wai'anae.

Yes, I know: It's a big, modern world and you need big bucks to play it safe.

That's the sorry truth about how globalization is changing the way we all have to live today.

Mike Leidemann's columns appear Thursdays and Saturdays in the Advertiser. You may call him at 525-5460 or send e-mail to mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com