Foray to the Sandwich Islands

Well, I have not made any posts in two weeks; in fact, I've been very busy and distracted by a family vacation foray to the Sandwich Islands, which for reasons that I don't really agree with, we have stopped calling by our good old fashioned English name and now use the native label (even though natives are not the majority population there) of Hawaii for some time now.  There's a movement to actually change the name again, slightly (adding an apostraphe diacritic, basically—it is often written Hawai'i, even though the official name of the state is Hawaii.  It is often also pronounced as if the w were a v.  I'm not sure what's driving this; the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, I presume, but again, I don't understand why anyone else cares about it. I still kind of like the name Sandwich Islands, myself.

Anyway, as is usually the case when visiting the Sandwich Islands, the climate was pleasant, the beaches were pretty and fun to swim in, I got pretty tan (a bit red, even, which peeled and then turned to tan—the legacy of my very thin genetic lineage of non-British ancestry) and everything was expensive.  Surprisingly, I ate less seafood and a lot more hamburgers than I expected to.  Luckily, in spite of the fact that I ate a lot of calories (as is often typical when on vacation) I burned a fair bit too doing sea kayaking, swimming and body surfing, paddle-boarding, etc.which kept me from gaining any more weight than I already have, and I'm already (hopefully) on track to reduce that back again and actually lose some.

But what struck me much more this time than last time I was in the Sandwich Islands nine years ago is how much like a Third World country the place really is.  Much of this is based on the ethnicity of what you see walking around the street (although that can be misleading because so many tourists, many from Japan, which are on the Island during the summer); the population according to the census has a plurality: 38% of Asians, from many backgrounds (but especially Filipino and Japanese) only 24% American (i.e. "white"), 23% mixed race, and 9% native Hawaiian (although many of the mixed descent include native Hawaiian.)  In other words, it feels like a Third World country because you're walking around seeing very few Hajnal Line first worlder people.  Just walking around, you might be forgiven for thinking that you're in the Philippines rather than America.  (Remember when the Philippines were part of America?  Yeah, that was a long time ago...)

Another part of it is the poverty and poor infrastructure.  The roads and parking lots are inadequate, poorly designed, cramped, etc.  Housing is often old and rather squalid looking.  Income distribution and modern conveniences are often skewed and sketchy unless you're right in downtown Honolulu or the Waikiki beach area, or other "nicer" neighborhoods, like parts of the east side of the Island around Diamond and Koko Head, or Lanikai or Kailua, etc.  The western edge of the island is quite dry and fairly poor, on the other hand, and has a bad reputation as being unfriendly to non-natives, or at least non-locals.

And finally, is the behavior.  People joke about "island time" and the laid-back attitude, and things like, yeah, there are rules and laws and whatnot, but people don't really care about where you park, or how you drive, or whatever.  But this is all behavior that is common to the Third World, and uncommon in Hajnal Line core western civilization, and it stands in pretty stark contrast to what those of us from a western civilization background are actually used to.  Now, I'm not saying that it's necessarily good nor bad; it works for them, of course, and a lot of people of ours come to love that laid-back lifestyle, but it isn't First World behavior.  It's Third World behavior.  And the end result, if you have enough people who practice Third World behavior, is that your country is a Third World country.

It's interesting to see the evolution of much of California, for instance, from being the Golden State a couple of generations ago, to becoming a Third World country right before our eyes.  Although few "mainstream" sources care to document it, San Francisco, for instance, has a trash and human waste problem that is almost unbelievable to someone like me who hasn't been there in 25-30 years.  If I hadn't seen L.A. with my own eyes a couple of years ago, I wouldn't have believed how much that place has gone downhill; Anaheim itself is now a trashy neighborhood that you almost want to avoid.

Anyway, I'm back.  I have no idea what I'll be working on blog-wise for the time being.  I'm behind on all kinds of stuff (most especially, reading the Tyrus Rechs Galaxy's Edge book, which I'm disappointed that I couldn't seem to make any time for while on vacation.)  And then I'm off again for a few days next week to go white water rafting in West Virginia.