The Slow Aloha

Almost from the moment we arrived in Hawaii in August 2008, we were confounded – confounded by the regulations that took our dog away without giving us a chance to see her, overwhelmed by the humidity that even now two years later rarely subsides, and perplexed by a population that numbers over one million by some authorities and lacks the cohesion and placidity many associate with Paradise.  But all that was gone in Maui, an island that is bigger than Oahu and that sustains a population only a tenth the size of Oahu.  “Maui has everything that Oahu has,” we were told, “but without all the hassle of Oahu.”  What we found in Maui on our recent visit there certainly proved the truth of that. Oahu brags of having the aloha spirit, but one soon discovers that it is hardly more than a slogan for guiling short-term visitors. Maui, though, has the genuine spirit.

Aloha has three meanings: hello, good-bye, and love.  Aloha on Oahu often comes across as good-bye only as those who try to negotiate the slow island lifestyle are ignored if they have come to stay too long.  “Don’t come to Hawaii. We don’t need any more tourists,” said often by those who oppose all tourism, blaming it for a number of ills in Hawaii,  may not have originated with Haunani-Kay Trask and her followers, but it has certainly caught on among those who identify tourism as a hostile takeover of native lands.  Outside of the tourist district that is dominated by Big Business, Oahu has little to do with the blondes and fair-skinned people who so obviously aren’t native or Asian.  It is much like what is happening in Arizona with the newly passed immigration laws that mandate a show of papers from all who are perceived as illegal residents there except in Oahu, it is happening to “haoles,” the foreigner who happens to be Caucasian and a term that is often used derogatively by the native population (similar to “gringo”) — not that Caucasians are required to show citizenship papers, but that the attitude regarding who belongs and who doesn’t is the same.  For the fair-haired and fair-skinned, blending in is difficult, thereby making easy targets for those who want to discriminate or to be passive-aggressive toward those who look and behave differently.  This I did not experience on Maui where noticeably the people were more harmonious. Unlike Oahu, Maui was settled by a different class of people, not by a class that today could pass for teabaggers, the ugly American who thinks the world is only a stepping stone under his feet.  This is what buoys the silent (and sometimes not so silent) aggression of the Hawaiians and the Polynesians who were nearly wiped out by disease brought in by the crew of Captain Cook and other Europeans, and broken in all but vengeful spirit by the ugly Americans who arrived to take advantage of their dwindling population.

But Maui was open to the world.  Maui loved its sailors and whalers and foreigners who came not from the upper crust nor from the religious bent but from the classes that knew that their survival and well-being depended upon working together, a microcosm of the international world they experienced on the working ships of the Pacific — which incidentally didn’t mesh well with the upper crust and the missionaries but nonetheless assured a vision wider in scope than either the privileged or the mission-bound could have brought about.  Perhaps Maui just tried harder, having been once the favored island and still home to Lahaina, the original capital of the unified islands.  And perhaps Maui’s open spaces allowed for blowing off steam when people were rubbed the wrong way. Or perhaps their kind of aloha sought to de-stress rather than impress the newcomer with some time share deal or otherwise awesome buy just waiting for the fool willing to part with his money. 

The bigger shame, though, is that all of Hawaii agreed to put all their eggs in the one basket of tourism.  It is the most lucrative game in Paradise, but it is also the most exacting.  Capitalism at its worst. Cost of living is expensive in Hawaii, not because of wages of the laborers — the average wage is the same here as it is on the mainland and the average annual earnings are not any higher for the tour bus drivers than they are for the city bus drivers on the mainland.  Yet the cost of living in Hawaii is 10% higher, and Hawaii ranks in the top ten of most expensive places to live in the U.S.  Hawaii doesn’t even have a public education system to brag about and ranks in the lower third in the U.S.  When tourism failed to render the dollars of past years, the education system also suffered.  Furlough Fridays were implemented to stave off an all-out lay-off of state employees, including most visibly, the public school teachers.  This also presented an extra burden to the parents who were thrust into confusion about what to do when their children did not go to school on Fridays.  Daycares now had to expand hours and include school age appropriate spaces, lunches, and activities and extra charges were applied to cover the cost of extra employees needed to cover the many children that would be in their care many more extra days, not just the holidays.  Even the state departments, those who conduct business directly with the public (like the offices that provide driver’s licenses) curtailed their hours of operation to ease a thinning budget.  Such activities, though intended to save jobs, contributed much to the anger of those who are not served well by tourism in good times and certainly are not served at all in bad economic times.  More homeless appeared in the streets; more beggars made their homes in the public parks and beaches that had been the big draw of Hawaii tourism and the corporate powers that profited from that draw.  This did not bode well for the dispossessed or the down and out, instead fed the ire and fire of hate.  And, of course, all this is quite visible on Oahu, the home to state government, the place of hope or hate, and where everything of that tenor plays out in political drama while the traders in tourism try to convince the public otherwise.

About a week after our arrival in 2008, the Iolani Palace was taken over by the Kingdom of Hawaii Nation Ministry Trust, one group of many such groups who believe their duty lies in restoring the monarchy.  Their goal was “to establish the palace as a new seat of government, undermine the state government, and declare the secession of Hawaii from the United States,” according to the entry in Wikipedia.  A similar takeover was committed in April (four months before our arrival) when the Hawaiian Kingdom Government, another angry group bent on overthrowing the “haole” government, led the charge to take back Hawaii for the native-born (see KHNL news report dated August 16, 2008 and Associated Press article, “Iolani Palace closed indefinitely after takeover” dated August 18, 2008, and other such articles).  Such groups are the reason that a bigger celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood was not presented to the world, not because Hawaii was afraid of outside scrutiny of its very own recently elected President of the United States.

Such things happen on Oahu, not on Maui, and such things work to contradict an environment of peace and tranquility exploited by Oahu’s tourism but an environment that Maui seems to have without the exploitation so much….and then I learned that Maui is a spiritual place, home to Iao Valley, the sacred home of the ali’i who are buried there.  No wonder aloha is strong there!

Still much of Maui’s reputation was little  more than hearsay to us….till we landed in Kahului and the different kind of aloha, the slow aloha, began its healing work.

We should not have waited so long to visit.

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Tags: Aloha, Hawaiian tourism, Living in Hawaii, Maui, meaning of aloha, Oahu and Maui