Dear Youth of Hawaii, this is a letter from your state legislators if they actually wrote you a letter.
They didn’t actually write you a letter. They’re too tired. This is satire to make the point that elected officials should be judged by what they do rather than what they say. You know what satire is, right? You get that in seventh-grade English and 10th-grade civics and when your teacher says, “Oh! The breeze is blowing today! There’s Gov. Ige cooling our classroom! Mahalo David!”
We, your elected officials, show up at your schools on career days and for the rare maile-untying or shovel-turning events when something is actually built on your campus, like maybe a chicken-wire recycling bin or new shelf in the robotics lab aka the custodian’s storage closet. We tell you to dream big, work hard, never give up because you hold the world’s future in your sweaty little hands.
We were just saying that. You knew we really didn’t mean it. You don’t do life that way, all brave and determined and hard-working. Pshaw! Life is limited by limits. Always remember that. Limits come in handy when you can’t get stuff done.
We have finished another grueling legislative session where we went to lots of grueling meetings, ate dim sum from boxes provided by lobbyists (which can get greasy and grueling after a while) and chased around TV news cameras hoping to be asked for an interview. (So grueling! You don’t even know!) And we came up against … limits. Did we climb over them? Nope. Around? Negative. Through? Not possible. Takes too much work. Hard, that’s why.
Learn from us, your leaders. Observe what we did:
1. Some problems are just too complicated to understand and too big to be fixed. When you come up against something that you can’t handle in the time allotted, don’t hurry, don’t push to finish, don’t dig deep or hustle up every ounce of wit and courage and strength you have. That’s too much to ask of anyone. When faced with difficulty, GIVE UP! No one expects you to rise to the occasion. Everyone will understand.
2. When you’re tired of wrestling with a difficult problem, go home! You need rest. You need time to put your feet up and think. It’s difficult to think when there are problems to solve. Meanwhile, make no promises to actually finish the work assigned to you.
3. Never accept responsibility. No matter what goes down, nothing is ever your fault. It’s another student’s fault or it’s the teacher’s fault or it’s the fault of the state of Hawaii that had the foolish audacity to be a beautiful little remote place that everyone wants to live in and nobody wants to pay for. There is always someone to blame. Don’t sacrifice your precious ego.
4. When everything falls apart, change the leaders. Even if there is no leadership. If your team loses because you’re all scrubs, don’t let anyone blame the scrubs. Change the coach. That gives you another free year of sucky performance without having to take any blame.
And lastly, dear Youth of Hawaii, remember that when all else fails, quote “Star Wars.” Here’s one from Yoda:
“Always with you it cannot be done … No! Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.”
Oh wait. Don’t quote Yoda. He didn’t know what he was talking about. Just try. Or just say you tried. That’s enough. No need “do.”
Love,
Your Legislature
