TRANSPORT, BUSES, SUCH A BORE February 22, 2016

 

When I first arrived on Kauai some forty years ago, Kauai was a feudal state. The plantation managers were the kings and their department heads were  lords and ladies. Field workers lived simply, but, for the most part, peacefully together. Outside this circle were the big land holders, small business and services, schools and hospitals, a few quaint island style hotels and a rich rash of city and county workers. It was a benevolent state. All of us, at our different levels, lived in peace with each other and the extraordinary beauty of the island and its surroundings. I think of the great and glorious fields of waving green cane,  a cash crop, which contributed to clean fresh air and extraordinary beauty.

I think of Iniki.  Troubled times, and how we all came together…visitors, too, some of them…as a family and worked towards restoration. I think these times are gone.

Today the island is a third world country. Treated with much indifference and malignancies by the rich.  The powerful.  The greedy.  The military  And a most fragile industry, the tourist industry. Today we are a hard hit, rapidly disappearing middle class, with a steadily increasing number of unhappy islanders.

How dare I  express this?

Because it’s true.  We live at  the end of a long line of destructive influences. Some people, mostly newcomers, question why we didn’t protest over-development. We did! But the big land holders, the rich and the greedy and their bought off political cronies, held all the cards. Look at the mess they’ve created on the highways.  None of us can afford the million dollar  needed to build more roads.

All of us on this island, rich and poor, brown, black, yellow and white, young and old will be catastrophically impacted by this ignored insult left unanswered. This monstrosity is always in the headlines.

We all have to transport ourselves to somewhere. Some people must commute.  And you can’t even write that  expense off your taxes. Buy a car, buy some gas, some oil, tires, batteries–whatever–go broke in the process.  Working people  have to get to jobs so they can pay for the commute. They have no choice. The rush to work, the rush home, causing road jams that just won’t quit.  We have constant, disgusting, frustrating  traffic jams. Bumper to bumper fore and aft. Any hour. Any day.  Coming or going.  Where or why. To satellites overhead we must look like ants on a senseless journey to and fro.

Add to that visitors who fly in and  rent a car. Off to their destination. Off to see the sights.  Which they can’t see, they’re driving so fast. Or grumped miserably in a lump of exhaust that takes the breath away.

Then we have locals who love their cars, trucks–four-wheeled noise makers–like Americans, a few years, back loved their horses. “I’ll die before I’ll let you take these reins from my hand.”

Horses were prettier, but history repeats itself. Such a bother. Such a bore.

 

 

 

 

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THE COSMIC PSYCHOPATH FACE TO FACE October 15, 2014

We’re in for a bad time.The struggle to protect freedom is a constant worry to those who love our country. What’s most disturbing is the obvious inclusion of a dark politically religious undertone ‘the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power’, as Jeff Sharlet wrote in his bestseller ‘The FAMILY’. it’s time to confront the Christian Mafia and the ‘murky, menacing men’ who run it. More cult than religion it rears its ugly head like some primitive beast risen from the grave to hound and confound. Barbara Ehrenreich insists we read the book but ‘not alone at night’. Heed her advice.

So powerful and insidious is this family of Nazi cultists it strains the senses to acknowledge its existence. But there is no denying Sharlet. He’s a fine writer, a respected journalist, editor, researcher and historian. His elegant ‘passionate, principled, and powerful’ expose has won praise from thinking people around the world.

Shake your head. Hide from the truth. This is the year 2014! Truths like these don’t belong. The Age of Reason can’t have died. We won the Second World War. Twenty million people died to defeat Hitler, and, surely, in the 21st century, mankind has evolved beyond the need of a mythical creature to rule and control us. A creature created with vile purpose by men of little or no worth other than the ability to use tricks of propaganda, learned at the hands of masters- Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels- to bring it to worldwide fruition. Dead men whose design and structure of social control was too psychotic to last, became the foundation of The Fellowship Foundation’s existence.

“I thank heaven for a man like Adolph Hitler, who built a front line of defense against her anti-christ of Communism,” Frank Buchman, a foundation architect and close friend of founder, Norwegian born Nazi sympathizer, Abraham Vereide, says it all. The close ties of this group to the men who run our country goes beyond any sense the reasoning mind can comprehend.

Infused with the foreign policy of George W. Bush, confused with the teachings of Leo Strauss, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, bemused with misty musty Americsn prayer day-breakfast meetings, secret cells-and an army of dimwitted evangelists preaching and teaching absurdities baffle the mind.

Some of their beliefs are so foreign to the American dream it’s a wonder they’ve been able to attack, let alone breach, the wall. Hidden beneath Machiavellian lies it’s a wonder we’ve been able to hold on to any truths we hold dear. Their mind-set abhors the very idea of separation of church and state. America is to become their theocracy. No taxes for the rich, and no taxes for the church. Endless wars for god and profit. No use for public schools. America’s children are to be home schooled with books written by them. Darwin out. Creationism in. Kids brainwashed to believe these lies with cult style tactics in cult style camps. They preach an economy so twisted it has the dismal science of economics standing on its head. Poverty is a punishment of god. Greed is a virtue. It’s a cult so deeply entrenched in misogyny one can pity for the simple-minded chattel who fall into its maws. So homophobic one worries about the safety of those with other sexual preferences.

And they’re thick on Kauai.