Posted on: Sunday, September 19, 2004

OUR HONOLULU

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

A headline on The Advertiser's editorial page last week, "A lot more security than we need," has been nagging at me for several days. The fellow who wrote the piece, Bart Kosko, is a statistician who teaches probability and statistics at the University of California.

He says you are in greater danger from the driver next to you talking on his cell phone than you are from a terrorist.

Kosko cites the statistics of causes of death annually — about a thousand killed by terrorists worldwide, 15,000 by murderers in the United States alone and 40,000 deaths by car accident. He claims Americans have a habit of inflating exotic dangers, like when we inflated the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and ignoring common ones.

This issue of security has hit me in a unique way. It's not just waiting at the airport and the orange alerts that fizzle out. I'm talking about a cost of security that is subtle and very local, how it affects the aloha spirit.

Five years ago I helped get the Honolulu Harbor Festival started. To me, Honolulu Harbor is one of the most underrated economic, cultural and entertainment assets in Hawai'i. How could we show everybody what an interesting place it is?

Somebody suggested a festival like Regatta Day that King Kalakaua held every year, attended by thousands. Or boat days that drew crowds to see ocean liners dock and depart. We came up with a tugboat hula contest judged by veterans of the Merrie Monarch Festival.

One of the most popular attractions turned out to be harbor tours. People waited in line to get on the boats because there is so much history in the harbor and so much important economic activity. Nearly everything in your house comes through Honolulu Harbor and you can see the cranes that unload it.

We held an outrigger canoe race around Sand Island and two canoes showed up. The second year we had 25; the next year, close to 100. At last, people were coming back to the harbor.

Guess what? The new security regulations have just the opposite purpose. It's to keep people away from the harbor so they won't blow up a facility that's so vital to Hawai'i. No more tours because somebody might take a picture of a pier. No more canoe races. No more tugboat hulas. The Harbor Festival set for Nov. 20 will have to do without them.

It's ironic that a cultural event like the Harbor Festival is on the cutting edge of our national concern for security. The same irony applies to the cancellation of freedoms from regulation that we used to take for granted. How real is this remote danger compared to what we're giving up for protection from it? I can't make up my mind.