Letters to the Editor
Didn't city engineers calculate the height?
I have been following the story about the Hanauma Bay Center for quite some time. Mayor Harris should not assume that we don't know the difference between an "error" and a deliberate change to the height of the building.
Didn't the city have engineers who calculated what could be seen from the beach and what couldn't?
Just like many of the projects in Honolulu, another chunk of money is wasted because the time was not taken to do things right.
Nona Akana
Rep. McDermott isn't only one in GOP race
State Rep. Bob McDermott has announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the U.S. House, Second District. I have been and will again be a candidate for that seat, and I expect to be the Republican primary winner in 2002, as I was in 1998.
My campaign positions are the same as they were in 1998:
• Lower taxes, a simplified tax code and an end to tax credits for working middle-class women who desire to put their children in federal daycare while stay-at-home moms get no tax credits for their commitment to their children.
• Deregulation of small businesses, for example, home-based businesses that homemakers and mothers can use to supplement family income. Also, an end to federal interference in homemakers caring for one another's children.
• Local control of education by getting the federal government out of the business of excessive interfering in parent, local school board and state decisions on how we desire to educate our children.
• Protection of innocent human life from conception until natural death.
I have told Kaua'i Mayor Maryanne Kusaka that if she decides to run, I will withdraw and support her candidacy for the seat held by Patsy Mink. I even like James Donovan for the seat, should he decide to run again. However, I do not support Bob McDermott because he does not live in the district and because Hawai'i and the United States need more Republican pro-life women in Congress.
Carol J. Douglass
Driver's licensing here is a nightmare
Our 17-year-old son had a regular, "no restrictions" driver's license from a Mainland state for more than a year when we relocated to Hawai'i. He has an excellent record: no accidents, no citations. Four months ago, he lost his wallet, which contained his driver's license. We thought, "No problem, we'll just go get a Hawai'i driver's license."
When we arrived at the Kane'ohe office, we were informed that his Mainland license was invalid in Hawai'i anyway because he was under 18. He needed to first take the written test, which he did. He passed. Then he was told he could only have a "learner's permit," which meant he needed a parent in the car with him every time he drove and he could not take the behind-the-wheel part of the test for three months.
Well, the three-month waiting period passed recently, so we went to take the behind-the-wheel part of the test and finally get a regular Hawai'i driver's license. Today we were informed that he needed driver's education training. When we responded that he had it almost two years ago on the Mainland, a licensing official said, "That doesn't count. He must have 'Hawai'i' driver's ed."
What kind of "idiocracy" makes up laws like these? Paradise? I beg your pardon.
Kathy Holz
Kailua
World War II wasn't like Hollywood's version
It was good to read the words and hear the voices in the May 20 edition of those actual witnesses to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and not just the images, not a few out of historical context, of the movie world.
My father, who lived on the Mainland and served in Europe and not in the Pacific, wrote the following on his introduction to the war:
"In that desperate and graceless spring of 1943, late on a somber afternoon, a long single file of soldiers labored up the gangplank, crossed a battle-gray deck and descended into the stuffy hold of a nameless ship. What I do remember is how 'un-Hollywood' it was. No bands, no speeches, no girls (pretty or otherwise), no bright and gaily colored streamers drifting crazily from decks to dock, no civilians of any description. It was routine. In that sense, it was for real." William Stigall, "A Shower of Frogs" (2001).
Neither the terror nor the boredom is accessible to us except through what those veterans and other participants said and wrote.
Sam Pooley
Front part of wave is what's important
There is a simple way to solve the confusing and potentially dangerous wave forecast/size-reporting dilemma:
Simply include the word "faces" after all wave forecasts in all media forms, e.g., "Surf on the South Shore today is 4-to-6-foot faces" (translates into 2 to 4 feet in the old "Hawaiian scale").
All surfers know that the "face" of the wave applies to the front part of the wave — the side you surf.
Robert Yonover
