Thank you Mr. Olopai, I’ll see you there

I am at the beach in CK almost every day and I will look you up. I talk to Carolinians almost every day and I see kids every day that are being denied the tools necessary to prosper in the 21st century. I saw Song of the Navigator in Honolulu, I met Mau on three occasions and talked to him about sailing. I flew over here in 1962 from Guam with Emmit Kelly. I rode the Four Winds over several times in ’63 with goods that Joeten and MSV bought for their stores from me. I lived here for eight years in the late ’70s and ’80s, my kids graduated from WSR, Hopwood, and MHS. My youngest son has lived here since ’79. I’ve been in and out since. I lived in Pohnpei for 15 years, Majuro for five, Kiribati 3.5, Fiji for a year. I’ve lived in Guam six times since ’58, Hawaii three times and the Philippines for more than 10 years since the early ’90s. I’ve visited almost every inhabited island in the Pacific. I know firsthand the corruption and payoffs made by the missing fingered Japanese, the Koreans and Chinese and the people who received it. I told Hillbloom he was wrong and I know MIHA is ripping you taxpayers off right now and no one cares because it’s just another “island thing.” I can tell you stories. My point is that all of this is moot in June 2014. It’s the past, telling stories about the glory days of sailing is fine but it shouldn’t replace the reality we live in in 2014. Adults today talk at kids, down to kids but not “to” kids. We never ask what they want because we don’t care. Just do as I say, it was OK for me and it will be OK for you.

Since 2010, when touch screen tablets and phones arrived, the world is a totally different place and we need to accept it. Little Carolinian boys and girls are not being nurtured in skills needed to be much more than cannon fodder or grass cutters. When the height of a kid’s ambition is to join the Army, this is unacceptable. JFK High School in Guam is about twice as large as MHS but their students have 700 times the number of uploads to YouTube, 2000 versus three, in the last year. This is the reality today, technology is here and it’s staying. If Mau had a GPS when he was a kid he probably would have gone to Spain.

Something needs to be done to shake PSS to its old-fashioned core. I invite you to help me do it. I want 12,000 touch screen tablets to give to every kid on Saipan from kindergarten through 12th grade. Yeah, I know, that’s about $800,000 but I know a painless way to get it too. Incidentally, I live on S. Olapai Way. See you soon.

Gary DuBrall
Chalan Piao, Saipan