Hawaii’s illustrious Senators, Inouye and Akaka, have called for public hearings on the vitally important matter of whether the postal service should reduce delivery to five days a week.
Clearly, they have their fingers on the pulse of those issues that are deeply concerning to Hawaiians. Â With economic woes galore and simmering tensions over different social and cultural issues, it’s high time someone came along and finally confronted the issue of 5-day-a-week mail delivery. Â Someone get those Senators their Profiles in Courage awards!
After all, what else could they possibly want to hold public hearings about? Â It’s not like either of them has sponsored legislation that will completely change the political, economic, and cultural face of the Islands and upend the way that minority and indigenous groups are defined.
Ahem.
When it gets right down to it, it’s ludicrous (considering exactly how significant the Akaka Bill is to Hawaii) that neither of our Senators have called for public hearings on its impact. Â Or even just to learn about how we regular folk feel about it and answer the (obvious) questions it raises. Â What are they afraid of? Â Do they just not want discussion and open debate on the merits of Akaka? Â Kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
A racial website. Let’s have one for Japanese only next?
Well, I believe the whole point here is that we’ve got a bunch of programs for a single racial group here (native hawaiians), and yes, that is racist. A website exposing that is criticizing that racism, not promoting it.
If there were a bunch of programs for japanese only, you’d see the same kind of issue.
I think you may have missed the point here.
The website is racially-oriented only because the grants are racially-oriented. We didn’t invent the classification, we’re just reporting on it.
Nor does that invalidate the question of whether these grants are actually helping the people they claim to. It actually makes it more important.
For what it’s worth, if there were a significant number of grants going exclusively to help Japanese-Americans, it’s like that there would be a website on it.