It is so much easier to solve tomorrow’s problems than it is to fix today’s.
It is the way of dreamers, the escape of the downtrodden stuck in miserable lives, the promises of star-crossed lovers — someday, someday, someday.
Of course, planning for the future is a smart, virtuous thing, but not when it comes at the expense of dealing with problems that are right here, right now.
David Ige became governor, threw off his wonky legislative practicality, slicked back his hair and reinvented himself as quite the futurist, setting out grand goals for Hawaii that, conveniently, he will not be responsible for reaching.
In a speech to world conservation leaders in Honolulu last week, Ige pledged to double local food production by 2030 by providing loans for farmers and more land for agriculture.
That’s awesome. It would be great to bite into a locally grown apple instead of some imported … Oh, wait, apples don’t grow well in Hawaii. Bad example. Well then, papayas. It would be great to buy a locally grown papaya. Oh, but the anti-GMO people have been waging war against local papaya growers who turned to (gasp!) science to outsmart a crop-destroying virus. OK, then milk! Locally produced milk would be so much more pono than buying stuff brought in from the mainland. Except the plan to put in a dairy on Kauai’s south shore has been met with vehement opposition and has sat, stymied, for two years.
This kind of starry “someday” thinking has played a part in the unfunny joke that is the Oahu rail project. All involved in support of rail were looking toward the future, when Kapolei is a bustling city hub and Ko Olina is a packed tourism hot spot in need of an army of service workers. The today stuff, the how-to-make-it-happen and how-to-pay-for-it practicalities, were treated as unanticipated surprises every time reality reared its problematic head.
And we all know how that’s working out.
And here’s Ige talking big about Hawaii’s utopian future while the leaders of tomorrow, the ones who will actually be responsible for making these declarations actually happen, are sitting in hot classrooms, stepping over homeless people to get to baseball practice and watching the actual Hawaii — not the fantasy Hawaii — get dirtier, more crowded and monstrously overbuilt. Meanwhile, real-life farmers and ranchers struggle for support from the state.
As the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s Richard Borreca put it in a recent column about the governor’s prolonged bobbling of the Maui hospital mess, “How about if he just works to ensure hospitals on all islands are sustainable and all citizens can be treated without a flight to Oahu?”
Absolutely.
Like rail, the pretty stories of sustainable Hawaii — be it food or energy — rarely come with discussion of a price tag. Doubling local food production sounds wonderful, but how much will that “sustainability” cost taxpayers and shoppers?
By all means, dream of a healthy future, but not as a distraction from the unhealthy, dangerous — and solvable — problems of the present.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@ staradvertiser.com.
