Fertile input from the grassroots
By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor
When trouble looms in Hawai'i, the traditional response is for all eyes to turn to the State Capitol.
Some say this is a cultural artifact left over from plantation days, when all problems were turned over to the plantation and its managers to solve.
While the plantations are long gone, we still tend to look to the "big house" for solutions. So, with Hawai'i facing an economic crisis, it was natural that the movers and shakers made their way down to the Capitol.
One would expect the atmosphere to be electric, with lawmakers and witnesses alike galvanized by the magnitude of the matter. But it wasn't.
Rather, it was almost desultory, as if everyone was simply going through the motions because it was expected of them.
Legislators sat en banc in the basement auditorium as speaker after speaker trotted up to plead special consideration for their small slice of the overall problem. No particularly brave or fresh ideas were presented. Rather, it was a series of commentary or mild criticism of a package of ideas that had been largely hashed out before the special session even began.
It was clear the best anyone hoped for was to tilt the ideas already on the table slightly more in their own direction. In short, it was a compressed version of what normally happens at the Legislature.
It's too bad, in a sense, that there wasn't time for something entirely different. Rather than having the same supplicants appearing before the same lawmakers, it could have been an opportunity for invention and innovation.
The people who were there were playing a familiar game: The lawmakers know how much money or power the state has and where it is held; the witnesses were interested in getting as much as possible of that money or power for themselves or their clients.
No one was operating outside of the familiar box. And what is interesting is that while it was business as usual within the Capitol, it is hardly like that outside. In every barbershop and around every dinner table, people are talking about things that could be done to "help Hawai'i." Not help themselves, necessarily, but "help Hawai'i."
You can sense this conversation in the letters to the editor. Ideas are flowing like crazy. Some of them would not have much impact, surely, while others might be unworkable. But they have in common the goal of making something happen for the state, for all of us.
Writers have talked about subsidizing airfares for Hawai'i-bound travelers, pushing up office Christmas parties and holding them in hard-hit Waikiki, declaring Honolulu a duty-free port, subsidizing fuel costs for the airlines — you get the picture.
The common thread in all these ideas — great or small, serious or silly — is that they are about the greater good. It's worth thinking about.
Reach Jerry Burris through letters@honoluluadvertiser.com.
