CUC: Humanitarian disaster?

Nonsense. The words, sown by a desperate few, are meant to harm and deceive rather than to assist. You want real “humanitarian disaster”?

That’s after the two recent Condition-4 hurricanes tore across the Atlantic Ocean and ravaged island nations; after killer winds uprooted trees and tossed homes; after giant 20-foot storm surges forced people to flee to the hills or die. And after Hurricane Ike slammed into Texas, over 3 million sufferers are without power—which will take more months to fix than our complainers could ever understand—and lead to disease and famine and pestilence and robberies and burglaries and murders.

Humanitarian disaster is what occurred in a series of fierce earthquakes in China, burying twenties of thousands of its helpless citizens, destroying and flooding swathes of farmland leading to starvation, accounting for heartaches in the millions, while recovery efforts continue to this day with no end in sight. Displaced millions? Destruction of humanities? A complete collapse of medical and emergency facilities? A repair bill for loss of life or property that run in the billions of dollars after months of salvaging, if not years?

Oh, please, have our very own disgruntles tell them all about Saipan’s “humanitarian disaster.”

And here’s much more: humanitarian disaster is the squalor a clutch of homeless Chuukese islanders, who barely survive by panhandling for food and drink on the beach behind Aquarius Hotel in Chalan Kanoa, hanging on to life in an abandoned concrete hovel abutting south of its parking lot. And the jury is still out on what misery will come from the violent magnitude-8 earthquakes now occurring in countries along the Ring of Fire in the Pacific, rattling the likes of Japan and Indonesia with tremors felt in—the Marianas. Cracks in the earth? Tsunamis sinking the islands? FEMA, the Stafford Act and “please-President Bush”?

With enough negativism, our very own doomsday-believers just might get their wish for “humanitarian disaster” right here in the Commonwealth.

What the voices of the candle-holders on this island are moaning about—they who have been spoiled, living “easy” under the American flag, taking and expecting more while giving less in return, and failing to comprehend the realities of life—while blaming this administration–is not “humanitarian disaster.”

What they’re complaining about is called discomfort.

I, too, have lost sleep, meat and a refrigerator, cursed, groaned and sweated, but sucked it up because I am confident Governor Fitial has both feet on the ground and giving his all. And given the spare resources he has to work with, the governor is also on the correct track toward a CUC solution—only one of a multitude of other burdens inherited from previous administrations. Certainly, those he chose to perform vital tasks in our community’s time of despair, and who failed him and us, we’re more than aware of. But whatever your politics are, corruption and dysfunction in CUC is one thing; trying to tack a course through lawmakers bent solely on vote-getting or assuaging the doomsday writers desperately in want of attention, is another. What the governor is doing is called order-of-importance. In the case of CUC, the nut is to get fulltime power back on, first. That’s called priority one. Then step up his attack on other critical problems.

Rising power rates? Wake up. Every single purchase and service in your lifetime has increased significantly. It’s called supply and demand—so live with it.

This is a fact: Those pretenders, who will never fully comprehend the depth of CUC’s problems, make-believe they know how to solve it. Those dissidents, angry at their own impotence, are vindictive in finding fault by expressing their own bitterness through their stinging letters to the editor. Why? Pointedly, they don’t know about something called business—or what it takes to survive in business. And of that vitriolic bunch, I only count one who has the courage to try working for himself in his own company. And the others? They hustle for someone else or are “employed” by the “local” government. Running the CNMI is like running a giant corporation with all its warts. So, I direct this question to those grumblers who, having never experienced the fear of bellying up in their own business, feel smug about getting a steady paycheck while working for others: How qualified are you in telling this governor how to run the CNMI?

To all of those cheese balls who know not business and what it takes to survive in it; who know not what methods and means Governor Fitial is employing to keep this community afloat, I say to them: after the Aggreko engines are hooked up and the bugs shaken loose and we have continuous and reliable power 24/7, what else could possibly keep you up at night?