Lucky live the Mainland!

One of the reasons for taking a vacation and going somewhere else, is to better appreciate what you have when you get back home -- and can more properly value the reality of "low everyday prices" on the routine necessities of life.

A lot of people in Hawaii take for granted that the reason tourism became popular again in these last few years was that because of President Bush's "War On Terrorism," people could once again feel safe to get on an airplane without the fear of being hijacked or blown up -- which greatly revived the travel industry, so much so that fuel consumption grew inordinately rapidly, as well as development in the "undeveloped" parts of the world.

All those "improvements" bring us to our current crisis in these times -- of overdevelopment and too rapid change for many to absorb and adjust to. So we're entering a "consolidation" phase in which there is relatively little further growth until we catch up psychologically and learn to appreciate and value all we have.

A large part of today's problem is that many now believe they are "entitled" to be rich, famous and irresistibly attractive, rather than that those things are hard-won in every life and generation, and one shouldn't just expect and demand them as our contemporary entitlements.

Yes, we're probably not all going to be able to retire and take as many trips around the world as we want, eating all the food we want, buying all the cars and gas we want, speculating on real estate to finance the lives we feel we are "entitled" to now just because we can "vote," as though that and writing letter to the editors of newspapers complaining about how everybody else should be doing everything for us so that we don't have to do anything for ourselves, is probably over, as it was just an illusion by demagogues to get their votes.

Now the hard work begins again in which each individual by their wise choices, distinguishes themselves from the easy money delusions that they are worldly wise because they think they know how to get something for nothing -- because our congresspeople can get all the pork barrel projects and earmarks so that bureaucrats in Hawaii just need to stand around looking busy and important -- while nothing continues to get done.

But it's a free country and free world, if that's the way they want it.