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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Tuesday, March 12, 2002

ISLAND VOICES
Questions that need answers

By Pamela O'Shaughnessy
Kailua resident

Here are some questions that the news media should be answering:

Why do 6-year-old girls wear bikinis at the beach?

Why do we save whales and pet bunnies and stop owners from developing their land because a rare bird lives there, then go home to our Sunday roast?

Why have we expended so much energy throughout history persecuting people who have a slightly different version of the Creating Force from ours?

Why do we decry abortion but send our 18-year-olds off to die in foreign lands?

Why does President Bush denounce jihads and announce a crusade?

Why does our classless country contain billionaires and starving people?

Why does beach-book fiction so often center on psycho killers and, lately, cannibalism?

Why do we stuff our faces and then head for the gym?

Why don't Christians turn the other cheek?

Why are we allowing our government to call prisoners of war detainees and to try people accused of terrorism in military tribunals instead of our court system?

Why do 6-year-old girls enter beauty pageants?

Why do we prosecute people who urinate against the wall in a city but provide almost no public facilities for doing so?

Why do we demonize nicotine consumption but encourage alcohol consumption?

Why do we invest in the stock market based on returns and not at all on what the company stands for?

Why does our tax code let the rich deduct interest payments on their second homes, but not let renters deduct their rent?

Why do we consider it an advantage to deduct interest on a home loan, when we end up paying several times the purchase price over 30 years to a financial institution instead?

Why are we gambling in the stock market with our retirement money?

Why won't we give full control of the Hawaiian homelands to the remnants of the Native Hawaiians after all these years?

Why do we let incapacitated mentally ill people roam our streets?

Why won't we take the bus?

Why do we pretend that we are rational? Why don't we admit we aren't, the first step toward controlling some of this irrationality?

Why are journalists ignoring the "why" in the stories?