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Most Puerto Ricans look at Hawaii and say, " This is the model that Puerto Rico ought to follow as the 51 state! However.............

June 20, 2009
NY Times, Editorial Notebook
Hawaii Blues
By LAWRENCE DOWNES

The state of Hawaii turns 50 this year (it joined the union on Aug. 21, 1959). People there should be happy. But it’s hard.

The economy is really bad. The housing market and construction industry are in deep slumps. Tourism has been hammered by the recession and swine flu. Unemployment is double what it was a year ago. To close a $688 million budget gap, the governor announced the most drastic furlough program in the country. She’s closing state offices three days a month, for two years. Aloha Friday, where people go to work in aloha shirts and muumuus, is going to be Furlough Friday, where they stay home in pajamas and look for jobs on the Internet.

And now, to top everything off, a communist dictator supposedly wants to blow up Hawaii. A Japanese newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun, reported this week that North Korea planned to launch a ballistic missile in Hawaii’s direction around the Fourth of July.

You can take the threat for what it’s worth. Hawaii isn’t panicking. But then, while no one wants to think of extinction, the word is far less of an abstraction in Hawaii than in other places. The islands have seen the disappearance of the Hawaiian kingdom, the decimation of its people and language. Today, Hawaii is the world’s hottest hot spot for threatened and endangered species. As the only island state, it’s the only one that faces an existential threat from global warming and rising oceans.

For years, financially squeezed Hawaii residents have been leaving in droves, setting up colonies in places they can afford, like the moonscapes of the Las Vegas suburbs. They’re exiles from paradise. Many people assume Hawaiian music is sweet and happy. Actually, much of it is solemn and melancholy. To hear Bla Pahinui sing his version of “Waimanalo Blues” — “the beaches they sell, to build their hotels,” is to glimpse the depths of the Hawaiian sense of loss.

Visitors go to Hawaii to get happy and tan, and they carry home with them vast measures of good will, serenity and memories of joy and peace. Maybe it’s time to give some of that back to the suffering 50th state. How? Maybe by telling your representatives in Congress to support the Akaka bill, to give Native Hawaiians a measure of lost sovereignty, and right some old injustices.

There’s a great July Fourth parade in Kailua, on Oahu’s windward side. It’s normally followed by fireworks, but they were canceled this year: too expensive. Some residents are trying to raise money to keep the tradition alive. Since 1948, people have sat on the warm sands of Kailua Beach, oohing and aahing as fireworks burst over black water. Now they can’t, in their state’s golden anniversary year. Could anything be sadder than that?