The World Beyond

After a while of being deeply immersed and familiar with the politics in Hawaii, the brain shrinks to deal with all the pettiness and endless bickering, robbing it of the energy to really be productive -- instead merely destroying anything of value so that it can be built again in an endless cycle of make-work projects.

Problems are made worse by their solutions because they create even more work, and high-paying jobs for those skilled at coming up with excuses for why things are getting endlessly worse. So there is no motivation for the solution of any problem -- only more options for things that can go wrong.

Thus, any attempts become futile, and those with the vision, capacity and drive for organization, well-being and well-functioning, are the first to leave, vowing not to come back. Those who remain and are attracted by those dysfunctions, come to rule, and drive everything into ruination, preying on one another until there is nothing left to plunder.

There are actually more people who have left Hawaii, than remain in the Islands for the rest of their lives. Each year, 7 million or so come to Hawaii, while the resident population remains at just a million. Of course the preference for visitors is to come and spend all their money and go back from where they came from until they save another fortune to leave on their next visit.

But that model of travel (tourism) is beginning to die now that people really can’t travel so casually anymore -- anytime, anywhere they want to, as though cost were no object, because it is, and always has been. The most popular growth of tourism has been virtual tourism -- in which it is possible to test-run living in any community in the world by having access to all the information, choices and even forums the local community has.

That’s especially true for housing, which is the greatest expense for most people to consider. It makes a huge difference if the monthly rent is $500 or $5,000 in one’s cost of living. The WalMarts of the world, have pretty much standardized the costs for everything else because of their capacity to profit from volume.

In the more individualized markets and transactions, experiences can vary greatly -- from the mutually beneficial, to virtual slavery and exploitation that occasionally comes to light, and shocks people that people in that society can still treat another in that way.

That is the importance of the underlying culture -- by which most agree that some things are just not fair and done -- while a few still think that anything they can get away with is fair, until somebody does it to them.