Posted on: Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Letters to the Editor

The most important 'family value'? Love

Ellen Goodman's Oct. 11 column "Gay ties: It's diversity, not perversion," in referring to the religious right's opposition to gay unions, says, "They see an assault on family values. We see family. Our family. Our values." Obviously, people define "family values" differently.

Yet, in matters of family, of trust relationships, of true and lasting friendship, there is only one value: love. Love that is unconditional, without qualification or limit.

All religions qualify the conditions of one's acceptability. As well-intentioned as these conditions may be, the result is always less than love.

Every mother whose faith includes the "family values" of the religious right loves her child with a love that embraces, accepts, supports and lays down its life for that child — straight, gay or whatever. Isn't this kind of love the "family value" we mean? If so, in spite of what we have been taught, why can we not yet embrace and celebrate the love between two committed people, regardless of their sexual persuasion?

The Bible says that without this "family value," everything else we say, no matter how true, is just a lot of noise.

Criticism of columnist on bail issue is off base

I have known two of the folks that Peter Wolff Jr. refers to in his Oct. 9 letter attacking David Shapiro for his Sept. 1 commentary about the outcome of Gary Rodrigues' sentencing hearing.

I am neither an attorney nor involved in the federal justice system. I've known Mr. Rodrigues as a UPW leader who was a frequent visitor and litigator in Big Island courts for 25 or so years.

I have known Mr. Shapiro for about 30 years, mostly as a competitor in my former career as a reporter. He's sharp and sometimes curt but almost always fair and insightful. He does not suffer fools willingly.

I do not know Judge Ezra, perhaps to my advantage in these comments. Nor have I met Mr. Wolff, an obvious O'ahu-centric federal figure with little statewide balance.

With someone in a family composed of former judges and attorneys, I find Wolff most condescending in his complaint. He speaks down, as judges and attorneys are often prone to do, to us mere mortals. Shapiro's commentary was accurate and on point.

Wolff's comments were self-serving and attempted to make everything "fit his point(s)."

Whether Judge Ezra erred in granting bail is to be debated, but to harass Mr. Shapiro for a fair and relatively balanced commentary is folly. I am certain that his piece was fairer than Mr. Rodrigues might have been, had the situation been in reverse. Especially since Mr. Rodrigues was once entrusted to help choose state trial judges.

Random drug testing must be supported

The problem with drug tests in public schools is that these tests are expensive — $50, according to a KGMB-9 report on the issue.

Projects in Hawai'i such as the Weed & Seed program are designed to ameliorate the drug problems. However, with the state prisons filled, incarceration of drug offenders is becoming a problem. Communities and the DOE should be responsible to pay for the random drug testing if they wish to see a decrease in drug use among teenagers.

The random drug testing will fail, however, if the communities are not willing to fully support the drug testing, even if some other donor paid for it entirely. Helping high school students through drug screening and rehabilitation will not only lower the number of drug users in the future, it will also lower the need for more prison space.

Letter writer wrong on Hawaiian claims

Kealiimahiai Burgess' Oct. 6 letter is mistaken:

• Kamehameha Schools' admissions policy actually disrespects Pauahi's will, which has no racial exclusion.

• Beginning in the late 1840s, the kingdom fostered English-speaking schools. The ali'i recognized that English was the key to a better life for Hawaiians. By the 1850s, Hawai'i had the highest literacy rate in the world. By 1893, over 96 percent of public schools instructed in English. Pauahi's will specifies English for Kamehameha Schools.

• Yes, America enslaved Africans for 300 years. Hawaiians enslaved their own people for over a thousand years. Called kauwa, meaning "foul corpse," they were kept for human sacrifice. Slavery in Hawai'i ended because of missionary Christianity.

• You said "We didn't come to America — America came to us." Wrong. You came to America in 1903, when the Territory of Hawai'i's Senate, with a clear majority of Hawaiians, voted unanimously for statehood (Prince Kuhio presented the petition to the U.S. Congress). In 1959, over 94 percent of Hawai'i's voters said yes to statehood.

• Your ancestors "shed their blood here" because your other ancestors killed them for their land. America did not tell "your ancestors how to live." Kamehameha II and III and Ka'ahumanu did that when, beginning in 1819, they abandoned the bloody kapu system and steered the kingdom toward Christianity, a constitution and civil rights.

• In 1898, America assumed Hawai'i's debt of $3.8 million, more than the value of the entire 1.8 million acres of ceded lands. And America immediately returned possession and control of most of those lands to the new territory of Hawai'i. (Title to most of the ceded lands was transferred back to Hawai'i in 1959 upon statehood.) No lands were stolen.

People of many different races were born here and Hawai'i is their home. Stop forcing Hawai'i's other citizens to pay your way. We don't owe you anything.

When bus fares go up, ridership goes down

For many years I rode TheBus, but when fares went up to $1.50 in 2001, I bought a motorcycle. You reported on Oct. 10 that Mayor Harris says that it's a lot cheaper and a lot more convenient to ride TheBus, but I can fill my tank and ride around the whole island for the cost of one round-trip bus fare.

And, I can go when I'm ready, at my convenience — no waiting.

Common sense tells us that when bus fares go up, ridership goes down, and with fewer riders, revenue projections fall short. Does this mean that even higher fares are needed to compensate for the decline in ridership? Isn't this a vicious circle that could lead to disaster?

A healthy and stable public transit system requires the right balance of subsidy, fares and service — a balance that has been lost by the Harris administration.

Auto registration fee should be based on cost

The police deserve pay raises — as do bus employees and any other employee who also deserves a raise — but Hawai'i is going about this the wrong way.

Auto registration fee increases shouldn't come from the vehicles' weight, they should be charged just as the state charges for income tax or for anything we buy: The more you pay for an item, the more you're charged in tax.

My answer is to tax vehicles not by weight but by the value of the automobile. I can't see a low-income individual who has an older, heavy vehicle being charged a higher fee than a CEO who has a Ferrari or Porche.

Televised ads showing speeding are to blame

It is saddening to read about the deaths of many of Hawai'i's young people involving racing and "drifting."

I think the car manufacturers are partly to blame. Almost every sport-type vehicle is shown "drifting" and speeding in new-car advertisements on television.

Some of the families of the victims should seriously consider taking legal action against automobile manufacturers that run this kind of ad. If just one life could be saved by banning unsafe driving portrayed in these irresponsible advertisements, it would be well worth it — not only for the families who have to deal with these terrible tragedies, but for other innocent drivers who also become victims.

Make the scofflaws pay

I read the Oct. 10 article on how the vehicle fee might be raised to cover the cost of the police pay raises and I'm pretty disturbed about that. Instead of raising the fees, raise the fines for those who get caught breaking the traffic laws.

Student testing matters a lot

The Oct. 6 editorial "School reform is not change for change sake" was correct in stating that I have "not lost enthusiasm for a campaign promise to break up the centralized state-controlled public school system."

Hawai'i's test scores have been at or near the bottom for years, and they are not getting better. Meanwhile, school districts elsewhere with decentralized, community-controlled school systems are experiencing dramatic improvement in test scores.

Defenders of the status quo are in denial. They are defending a system that is not adequately preparing Hawai'i's children for the future. And, they are sending the wrong message to students and parents when they contend that a majority of our students cannot be expected to meet minimum standards, and that test scores don't really matter anyway.

Department of Education officials make the point that testing doesn't tell the whole story about a student's achievement.

I agree there are other achievement measures, but in the "real world," tests do matter a lot.

Students need to demonstrate basic competence to get any good job and achieve a minimum test score to enter the military. Tests also determine admission to most post-secondary educational programs, which for most people is the primary gateway to a better life.

And anyone wanting to work as a government clerk or secretary must pass a civil service test.

Yes, the military, universities and employers also take other criteria into consideration, but you must first perform reasonably well on some kind of test in order to have a chance to compete for most jobs and training opportunities.

Downplaying the importance of test scores is nothing more than an excuse for poor results.

Worse yet is the excuse from many within the current statewide school system that the low scores are because we have so many non-English-speaking students and students from poor families.

As demonstrated recently by visiting education leaders, there are Mainland school districts with higher percentages of poor, non-English-speaking students that score dramatically better than Hawai'i.

The difference is that these Mainland school districts are community-based, with money actually reaching the schools instead of being soaked up by a large statewide bureaucracy. Their principals have the autonomy and responsibility for producing good results, and they are held accountable for achieving such results.

I agree with the editorial's comment that "simply dissolving our current statewide system is no silver bullet." But I strongly disagree with the conclusion that "our centralized system can be fine-tuned to produce better results." This would be a classic case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

While no silver bullet, changing our school system from a statewide bureaucracy to a community-based system is a critical step in the mix of changes we need. The other changes include: moving at least 50 percent of the resources currently consumed by the DOE into the classrooms, adopting a more equitable means of allocating money among individual schools, providing greater autonomy for principals, increasing support for charter schools and restoring discipline in the classroom.

Why all the effort to defend a failing system and the reluctance to support a system that we know works in other communities?

Let's band together to make this historic change so that all of Hawai'i's keiki have a chance for a good future filled with a wide range of opportunities.