Dear India's Mom

Dear India's mom,

You don't know me, but I know you.

I know you are from South Africa.  I know you probably have some major issues around race and class.  I know you don't like my boyfriend.  I know you said some things to him that were so hateful and mean that you are incredibly lucky he is a peaceful human being.  I know what you said pissed off my ex military redneck dad enough that he was willing, rather, anxious, to literally want to "put you in your place".  I know you live on Kailuana and want to keep the rest of us dregs of society out.

I also know your daughter is a very cool woman.  I know she gets things on a level that you don't.  I know that you, despite your personal feelings, have let your daughter continue with lessons at a place a person you don't like manages.  I also know that somehow, your daughter wound up with the only white guitar teacher there.

Look, I have a number of friends from South Africa, mainly Jews from Cape Town, who spent years in prison or under house arrest for opposing apartheid.  I also have white friends from Jberg who left in fear because they didn't know what was going to happen to them after apartheid was over.  Given the history of Africa, this wasn't a stretch.

I know that when a bomb goes off in a shopping center in Jberg that the shrapnel doesn't ask you what you believe of what color you are.  I know that when I was living in London, the bombs the IRA set off in Victoria Station while I was on my way to school didn't ask me if I supported the mission of the IRA.  (I did support the mission, not the methods).  Life is complicated and things escalate very quickly when you are dealing with people's freedom or land or ability to feed their families.

That doesn't excuse what you said or how you acted to a person that was attempting to have a conversation with you as a potential ally.

Pulling the race or class card, on either side, is fucked up.  When you told my boyfriend that you "had the money and attorneys to keep them off your "private" beach for 50 years", you confirmed every worst stereotype about people like you.

Intelligent minds can disagree - I firmly believe that.  When you were questioned and got scared or mad or indignant and reacted the way you did, you ceased being an intelligent person, at least for that moment.

Here is the deal - Hawaii was not an idyllic place pre-contact by England.  It was a classist society in which commoners could be killed for not knowing their place in society.  It was, at times, a very violent society.  Contact didn't make it much better, it just changed the class structure.  Ensuing immigration and inter-marriage made it a pretty unique place, but still not a perfect one.  There was one key principle that we all accepted as members of this society, however.  It was that the land belonged to all of the people.  Particularly to access fishing and gathering grounds and to the beach.

I understand that a lot of transplants, like you, may not have understood this before you came or have gleaned it since you have been here.  But that access is something we hold sacred.  When you bought a tract of land, cloaked it under the guise of a non profit corporation and put a gate on it, you violated that trust.

You can, and should, expect to be challenged on that.  Just as you can expect additional eyes on your neighborhood.  I looked up the tax records on your little street and found that almost all of the property owners were trusts (set up to avoid probate and estate taxes in the event of death) and/or NON PROFIT foundations and businesses.  I have spent more than half of my career in non profits and I can assure you that I never worked in a $5 million office.  Likewise, the "businesses" tended to be owned by a woman in a quasi-heterosexual marriage likely in order to claim the status of "woman owned business".  Ownership was assumed by me using last names and has no basis in fact as being about 60% haole and about 40% Asian.

Doing one of my may bike-bys of the access gate in question (I don't take my car because it is a piece of crap 1996 Tercel that would be a pretty clear giveaway to my current position in the economic hierarchy), one of your neighbors offered to unlock the gate for me and two other women (one was haole, like me, and the other Asian).  I don't know if, as a slightly chunky woman in my mid 40's, I am incredibly unthreatening, your neighbors are hella cool, or I got a race pass, but not everyone that you, or your charming neighborhood spokesman, pretend to speak for is a total jackass.

The "news" coverage by the smarmy and bordering on unethical Chris Tanaka, appears to have "closed" the matter with a smirk and an acknowledgment that yeah, you guys forgot to get a permit for 15 years but we are sure you have enough money to pay the fine so you can all go away now so we can have a martini.  Chris, that was intentionally a run on sentence.  Unlike you, I actually did INVESTIGATIVE journalism when I was a junior at Kaiser High School.  I pissed off the principal.  I got myself suspended.  I sometimes wrote crap that had no basis in reality and I called it what is was - creative writing.

So India's mom, you have lots of supporters.  From the elected officials who feed from your trough to the lobbyists who HASHTAG! defend you in social media.

I know this was kind of harsh and I pray that you are a better person than I tend to think you are right now. That you were just scared or mad or having a bad day.

If you want to have an intelligent conversation with me or my man, I would welcome it.  If not, I offer you this piece of advice - learn when to shut your fucking mouth.

Sincerely,

Jennifer

And we all wore helmets

After returning to my hometown of Honolulu for a year of figuring out what was next, I came to the same conclusion I had come to 21 years before.  Get. the. fuck. Out.  

Returning home after living on the mainland, I accepted a job because I needed the money.  I should know better, but since I was looking at a MINIMUM 50% wage cut, I figured I could handle, since that was apparently a “cherry” position.  (Mainland translation – growing up we had a culture of “cherry” trucks and cars.  Tricked out old Toyota trucks (with the lettering scratched out so it said “Toy” and VW bugs that somehow held 45 Samoans) so the term cherry means neato.

I am an idiot as anyone who ever watches me dance can attest (SHUT UP JESS), but I guess I at least expected to be treated as a relatively intelligent idiot in the job market.  I graduated the top of my class, had my entire tuition paid for by the state, got extra money as a Ka Leo writer and funded the rest by living on old coleslaw I took home at the end of every night's shift at TGIF on Ward.  Please see "Confessions of a Waitron" the best feature's story from 1993 written by (blushing) me because I don’t like to brag.

I hated it back in Hawaii.  In Seattle, I had worked in academia and high tech and, as a director, was able to call my own hours.  Work load demanded that I work at home at night, every night for years.  One day, after working until 3 a.m. the night before on a policy document, I decided to leave work at 4 p.m..  I had arrived at 7:15 a.m..  The next day, I showed up for work at 8 p.m. rather than 8 a.m. and was so blurred out that I couldn’t differentiate night or day.

My first job in Hawaii for a major local retailer lasted 3 weeks before I literally walked out – and I don’t do that.  After putting in 9 hours in the office and 4-5 hours at home at night to fix the glaring legal and compliance issues left by my inept predecessor, I left at 3 p.m. one Thursday to hit a farmer’s market.  My boss, a very traditional third generation Japanese American who owned a large chunk of the ownership of the company, was pissed.

You would have thought I stole the Linderberg Baby or something.  She called around looking for me (never actually called me), put a GPS tracker on my car and then lit into me the next day.  “Where were you at 4:15?”  I left?  “Why?”  I was done?  “What if we needed to reach you?”  You can call my cell?  “Did anyone tell you that you could leave?”  No, I am exempt, I put a note on my door and an out of office message for people to email or call me if they needed anything?  “I heard you were talking to the employees!”  Yes, of course I am.  “You can’t do that!”  Why?    

Look, I am the kind of person that gets 2 years of work done in 3 months.  This sitting my ass in a chair and counting it as productivity was clearly not going to work for me.  I am not Glen Miyashiro and I will never be.   Despite the constant headaches, I will always be the nail that sticks out the furthest that gets hammered down the hardest. 

So I walked. 

I decided to take an academic approach to job searching.  I surveyed employees and employers, requested multiple interviews and was actually told by three different companies that I was “too haole” (too white, white people).  This kind of shit would land you in court in Washington or California, but I knew better here and reconciled that if they were racist, they were at least honest.  I regularly used the term “haole” which literally means “without a soul” to jackasses from the mainland who made me ashamed to share their pigment.  The fact that I am obnoxious and loud and frequently insensitive has little to do with melanin and more to do with the fact that I am loud and obnoxious and often insensitive.  It is one of my most endearing qualities.

The thing that really drove me batty, was the overwhelming drive to dumb down anyone and everyone in school and the workplace.  My step brother, another haole that worked for Honolulu City and County was told by the head of HR that his efforts to improve quality were great, but he needed to back off because he was making everyone uncomfortable and feel bad.  I am not kidding and I am not surprised.

The fucked up thing is that this culture of mediocrity hurts the Hawaiian kids the most.  The Asian kids just zip their lips and play along and know they will be able to persevere and prosper – and they have done AMAZINGLY well and should be commended for taking their grandparent’s status as basically indentured servants to the managers of the business and government world in 40-80 years.  The haole kids just say ‘fuck it’ and plan to move to the mainland.  The Hawaiian kids, who tend to learn best as a group and like to discuss answers collaboratively and not cause anyone to lose face because they said something stupid before making a decision (this is based on research into how kids in Hawaii learn, not the usual crap I make up to back up my opinions), are seen as ‘dumb’ or ‘disruptive’ and they are not AT ALL.  They are doing exactly what we all should be doing in a small community with a variety of stakeholders with a variety of backgrounds.  

But they get the short end of the stick.

One of my best friends from high school is an elementary school teacher.  She is Portagee and her son is Hawaiian/Chinese/Haole (the trifecta of localness, IMHO).  I went to her house one day to find her gluing pictures to construction paper.  I asked her what she was doing and she said she was completing the kids’ assignments.  “How old are they?” I asked.  Seven, she said. 

You have to be fucking kidding. 

At seven, I was making dinner for my mom and cleaning the house.  By 12, I was babysitting other kids.  At 16, I traveled to Europe by myself.  At 17, I lived in my car when one of my mom’s fucked up boyfriends was around.  Any one of things today will get CPS at your door.  I am not exceptional, I did what I had to do.  But I learned how to figure shit out and that has saved my life to this day.

I don’t have kids, so I don’t have the same passion about safety and stranger danger and paste.  I guess I figure that if we could pull it off, they could too.  I could use paste and glue and scissors at age 5, and I have the haircut photos to prove it.  I knew how to take a trans Pacific flight alone at age 6 and got to sit the cockpit with a little eyelash bat.  I took a bus from Minneapolis to Shreveport, LA by myself at age 7 – and I am not exceptional.  Trust me, I am NOT exceptional and I still eat paste and sniff glue.  But I was allowed to TRY.

I sure picked a hell of a day to quit sniffing glue.  (bonus points on the reference…)

My step brother and step sister told me that they had to walk with their suitcases 2 miles through Kailua to go to their first field trip.  They are about 10 years older than me, but I am so stoked that they had to do it, alone, and figure it out.  They are both amazing parents and human beings.  They let their kids screw up.  They let their kids fall down and break things and get burned on the stove and feel the consequences of their actions.  Because THAT IS HOW WE LEARN. 

Humans learn the most and most important lessons in painful ways.  They could be physical (touch a hot stove and it burns you) or emotional (treat a friend in need like crap and try to go to them when you need solace), but we do, very effectively, LEARN.

You have to learn how to make up your own games and own interests without being programmed.  I am grateful that I was allowed to fail – as a child and as an adult.  It has taught me so much. 

I need to know I can fall down if I am playing tag.  I need to know that going in at Makapuu on a big day will cost me my swimsuit and perhaps an arm.  I need to know that reporting a big violation at work may cost me my job.  And I know that I am competent to take these risks BECAUSE I know the consequences. 

So what is the coherent thread in this rant?  Humans need to take risks.  Humans need to be able to figure things out on their own.  Humans need to get hurt in order to learn sometimes.  Humans, whatever their age, need to be able to be human. 

Oh!  And unlock the fucking gate at Kailuana already, you people are getting annoying.  I hope you don’t have to learn the hard way.