The Transformative Experience (Back to the Basics)

Home gardening is probably the single greatest activity a person in Hawaii can be engaged in -- to teach them the lessons of cause and effect, consequences, and the rewards of meaningful work.

With no industry or agriculture to speak of, people think that if they want something, all they have to do is sign-wave down at the Capitol -- and then like magic, planes full of money from the federal government will arrive -- along with rich Japanese tourists.

So the people have lost a vital connection to productivity -- and think if they want anything, they just have to demand it from their government (legislators), and not that they can provide these things for themselves.

That's an important experience in the development of cultures, societies and civilization, and lacking that, one has the experience of the vandals who think that the reason for the wonders of human ingenuity, is to destroy them -- because they don't know how to create anything, but only know how to destroy them -- as the activity they are familiar with.

So giving such people more, does them no good -- because they always transform something into nothing, instead of learning how to create something out of nothing -- or very little. That is the transformative experience that makes progress possible, and not just "giving" more to people who have no appreciation or understanding of how it came into being.

That is the education even, and especially the educators need, to be productive and useful human beings -- instead of people who think they shouldn't be working for "free." That's how nothing becomes something.

Many of Hawaii's problems are connected to the simple lessons of recycling wastes -- to produce rich organic material that the sandy soil of Hawaii is poor in, and so they cannot grow despite the abundant sunshine.

Even plants don't just happen -- automatically, but have to be planned and cared for, by people who know what they are doing because they learn it doing it -- and not just in the useless academic way that deceives people to think they know anything useful.