Where Do We Go From Here?

By now it is becoming apparent to the mainstream (mass) media that their fondest hopes have turned into their worst nightmare -- that after eight years of blaming, complaining, whining, and abusing -- they no longer have George W. Bush to kick around anymore, and they have to make it on their own merits. Many are realizing they have no merits except for blaming, complaining, whining and abusing -- with no other target in sight but their own recently coronated messiah.

It’s deja vu all over again -- as one so recently crowned the Kings of Kings, now begins to hear from the fickle crowd needing to fulfill their recently acquired taste for blood and humiliation -- “Crucify him, we know him not.”

These are the lessons played out through history and literature, yet amazingly, people always think it is different this time, and we no longer use and abuse people like they did a thousand or a hundred years ago, because we are so progressive, enlightened, liberal and democratic -- as though merely repeating the words, was enough to make it so.

After eight years of merely proclaiming another “Stupid,” as though it was some intelligent thing to do, thinking by that fashionable manner to display one’s own high intelligence and nothing need further be explained as long as one was riding the right bandwagon, it’s quite a shock to wake up the next morning and realize that one has nothing else to say -- and the whole syndicate is waiting for their instructions on whom next to target for blame, and the usual suspects are all gone.

So what does the restless crowd do to maintain their focus? The logical and rational answer would be to develop a positive vision of a well-functioning society -- of course, but that wasn’t in the curriculum. Only the endless mass protests against those really doing something positive and constructive. It’s quite a beautiful thing to see -- when those who have demanded so vigorously for the power and freedom to create that perfect vision that only they need know about -- have no organizing, sustainable vision but to retreat in utter confusion and anomie.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have earned their well-deserved rest in their thankless jobs of service to society and can feel justified that they have done what they said they were going to do -- and that is to ensure the safety and lives for the next generation to go on. George W. Bush was not the problem. He was the answer the manipulated masses were brainwashed into thinking was their only problem.

A Grateful Nation

On 9/12/01, what do you think the odds were that there wouldn't be another American killed on the American homeland for the remaining duration of President Bush's term?

It was off the boards; nobody would believe that such a thing was possible. It was inconceivable given the rising unrestrained attacks by terrorists all over the world -- in planes, ships, railcars, workplaces, athletic competitions, shopping malls -- with no firm response and resolve to end it with finality.

That's the legacy of President George W. Bush.

After the world came to a complete halt and cessation of all activity, this economy and the world went on to recover to unprecedented levels of affluence and economic activity, as recorded by the Dow and other indicators -- and the perennial blamers, whiner and complainers now can only focus on blaming the President that we have fallen off from those all time highs as a lack of any achievement.

We truly hope every succeeding president can do as well.

The End of An Era

One senses that an old way of life is dying -- while undoubtedly, a new one is emerging from its ashes. That’s the big story seldom written about because the media writers are lost in the petty details and politics that provide them endless employment for speculation while losing the sense of it all.

And that is that life always changes, always evolves, always progresses -- whether one wishes it to or not, and many in Hawaii, choose to live there in the thinking that it is the one unchanging “paradise” in the world, when it is like any place else, while at a disadvantage for much that is going on at the leading edges.

If one isn’t aware of it by now, a lot of the underpinnings of the old societies have collapsed, as represented by real estate and other tangibles that were thought to be the "realities" of life -- that such things can only become more valuable indefinitely, and not that that could ever change.

Those now still heavily invested in such “truisms,” have been wiped out, or are still left holding a bag of liabilities and debts, rather than the assets they recently thought to monopolize and hoard. That’s how quickly fortunes can change. As recently as mid-September of 2008, many of the stocks of the financial institutions that went into free fall before even disappearing entirely, were at all-time record highs, such as Washington Mutual, which was the glowing success for an entire generation ending abruptly in 2008. Until the very end, there was no hint that anything was amiss.

It was among the triumvirate of stocks that led the new age and economy of the ‘90s and beginning of the 2000s, along with Microsoft and Starbucks. Unquestionably they changed life -- and prepared it for the next step, which is beyond consumerism, and the post-consumerist culture and society many are already adapting to.

That will be a difficult transition for some places more than others -- as we shift into a post-industrial age into a more innovative one -- characterized by doing more (or better) with less. Such a concept seems strange and foreign to those culture built on waste, patronage and fraud -- and the thinking that there is no end to the money, and all one has to do is demand it louder and more persistently than the others, and it will be granted.

We are used to thinking about such an approach as the familiar pattern of people’s first impulse being immediately to simply leave the Islands in disgust and not look back -- and for the least productive in society to encourage them to do so -- to increase their own chances for survival, if not eminence among the remaining hopeless “losers” -- who become more desperately exploited by the most ruthless and unscrupulous.

At such times, the possibility and opportunity for change that transforms such societies, were never more fortuitous -- but one has to look and see into creating the future rather than simply rewriting the past. That’s what takes a lot of the old institutions down.