Obama’s Ohana is MLK’s Aloha

M. L. King, Jr. in his now famous I had a dream ’63 speech dreamt “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The charismatic and iconic leader joins the rank of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela among the revered exemplars of the non-violent protest movement, and on the days preceding OCCUPY spring, as the northern hemisphere thaws out of its dead winter into the inviting dawn of warmer public parks, proponents of social justice stir afresh from their momentary coldness to strategize on effective methods to forward their humanizing aims.

The U.S. has forgotten our “manifest destiny” to be a “beacon on a hill.”  Instead, we have become the self-appointed guardians, administrators, and controllers of the world’s oil resource. Our industrial path goes through the thick sludge of crude oil and we have gotten addicted to the comforts and profits the liquid carbon brings.

Obama is grudgingly admired for sending grunts to terminate Osama, but his promise to close down Guantanamo’s controversial detention center, and the questionable use of drones to eliminate adversaries in a manner that is proving sticky on constitutional grounds, are getting mixed reviews.

It has not helped the country that some of our grants behaved inhumanly over some dead adversaries, with the latest viral video of our gents in uniform peeing on dead “enemies.”  We always thought that was something that the enemy would do to us.  Our folks of the clipped cadence now seem to do it with impunity!

Heretofore, the only method we seem to employ is the Spartan defensiveness that our Pentagon, in consort with a global network of corporations, has zealously appropriated, protecting gains from the past so as not to lose it, only to lose whatever gain we’ve attained by failing to consider that the freedom and justice universally sought after has benefited only a few.

In many free and democratic societies, some folks are definitely “more equal” than others.  In the distribution of personal wealth, the deep cleavage in the United States between the 99 percent of those that-have-some to barely-have-none, stands in clear contrast with the 1 percent that would not mind, if they have their way with the politicians they bought, to have it all. This may sound like a broadcast byte of demagoguery, but the image has become more than just metaphorical.

The world is convulsing because the financial house of cards we carefully cultivated through the years and imposed on the globe is coming down. A new system more participatory and broader in coverage is coming online.

Honolulu’s MLK “We Are the Many” and “the Many One-e pluribus unum” Day paraded its diversity in its rainbow coalition, both straight and LGBT.  Obama’s Ohana appears to be MLK’s “the-way-life-is” Aloha.

That diversity is being tested on a concrete issue of the rapid transit system. The voters agreed to  to construct a Metro rail between UH Manoa on the south to the second city of Kapolei north to decongest the three interstate highways that crosses the island of Oahu and slows down traffic at snails’ pace, at least, two times a day.

The universally perceived “need” has run aground against the tsunami of local politics.  No less than former guv Ben Cayetano of Philippine descent has declared his candidacy for the Honolulu Mayor’s office in the next election on only one issue: stopping the Metro Rail project that is already in the process of being built. Originally estimated to cost $5 billion, a conservatively 40 percent increase of cost anticipated in a declining revenue situation in the current economy, it is inviting a serious rethinking of the project.  That the island wants the rail is not in question. Whether it can afford it is what is in contention.

This leads back to the question of whether Hawaii can live off its Ohana orientation in the Aloha spirit. In one sense, the same question may be asked of the nation by Obama and his crusading spirit on the stagnant U.S. economy, and the bloated and overextended reach of its military. In this election year, there are many forces intent in not allowing Obama to raise that question and would rather that things remain as they are, keep the illusory story that government is the deadweight, and the corporations that now rule the world be allowed to right a vessel a-kilter on its own devices. That, or find a whipping boy on which to blame the nation’s woes!

That same “big government” is what keeps the CNMI afloat in the absence of any realistic economic base that is not founded on a legal loophole. Since the CNMI is without a sense of Ohana re its residents, nor the spirit of Aloha among its members (Chamorro-Carolinian relations alone is problematic; throw in Filipinos, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, FSMs, Pacific islanders, South and Southeast Asians, and one has a ready made can of worms) as long as Obama continues to fund the CNMI’s essential services to keep it in being as a welfare state with a U.S. zip code, the predominantly privileged Chamolinian government employees will survive.

Honolulu’s rail is a different issue but if its Ohana stays actively diverse without losing its Aloha, then Obama’s home ground might just make MLK’s dream of social justice in a rainbow configuration come true.

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.