Musings: Reheated

The moon, just hours from fullness, fell into a puffy black pile atop Makaleha and was lost, a silvery gilting the only trace of her presence, when Koko and I went out walking this morning. Orion and the Big Dipper squared off in the south and north, respectively, as golden Venus rested on a flying carpet of gray in a sky that turned first robin’s egg blue, then pale lavender and finally hot pink.

As we walked, several bicyclists passed us and it got me thinking about the Wailua-Kapaa Neighborhood Assn. poll on the proposed bike path at Wailua Beach. I got an email from the Sierra Club on Saturday, urging me to vote, with the question posed as:

CONSTRUCT A 14 FOOT WIDE TREX BIKE PATH ON A SACRED CULTURAL SITE OR RESPECTFULLY LEAVE IT IN ITS NATURAL, INTACT STATE?

Well, when you put it that way….. But it seems the poll must have closed, as I couldn’t find a link on the WKNA site.

Self-select polls are becoming more popular, especially on newspaper web sites trying to build traffic. But do they really have any meaning?

Now the county is getting into the act, with a survey planned to poll people on whether dogs should continue to be allowed on one small stretch of the very same path — although here it’s called “multi-use” — so long as their owners follow a slew of rules or face fines and a court hearing.

Who wants to screw with that or worry about an encounter with a ranger and/or path vigilante when you can walk your dog so many other more desirable places without having to worry about blatantly displaying a doo doo bag or measuring the length of your leash? Do you suppose one of the survey questions will be should we just drop this nonsense and let people exercise common sense and courtesy?

A friend who is a strong supporter of the path often makes the case to me that it’s needed to ensure lateral access to the coast. That’s all well and good, but one reason I go to the beach is to get away from humans and their incessant need to control the actions of the others and cover the earth with concrete.

And that brings me to another topic. I’d often like to respond to some of the comments left on this blog, but I rarely have the time to get into such exchanges. So every now and then I’ll pull a few into a post, such as this one left on the No Aku Birds post after I did leave a comment saying that living lavishly is morally indefensible:

Okay...so please explain how being wealthy is "morally [in]defensible" other than you think, because you are poor that no one should have more than you do. It appears that you think that if they are more productive than you, that they should give it all to those who CHOOSE to live a less productive lifestyle rather than working hard for something to better themselves. How does being productive and enjoying the fruits of one’s efforts hurt humanity? You socialist continue to make the same logical errors over and over by espousing a system where hard work is not rewarded other than the self-satisfaction of having done a good job. It worked quite well in Russia, is working quite well in North Korea and even the Chinese communists realized that people just mope along if there's no good reason to make an effort. It's you liberals moral bankruptcy that is failing in that you think you are owed something you didn't work for because you CHOSE not to work for it because you feel it's your right to goof off and be under employed rather than making an effort to actually improve people's standard of living through invention and ingenuity. The liberal concept of taking other peoples' money is a loser philosophy. Charity should be for those who actually need it; not for those who choose to be hedonistic leeches.

First, I never said that being wealthy is morally indefensible, but living lavishly, because it boils down to some people consuming far more than their fair share of the earth’s finite resources, while others have nothing. As for hedonistic leeches, I think that term could quite fairly be applied to some of the trust funders and capitalist exploiters who have, in fact, taken other peoples’ money, and sometimes their life energy, too, so they can live excessively large. And let’s not kid ourselves that everyone is on a level playing field, and that simply by working hard and being productive they’ll be assured of accumulating wealth. There are plenty of people busting ass every day with nothing to show for it.

And when you get right down to it, there seems to be a much stronger sense of entitlement among the wealthy, who so often have the attitude that money, or their pursuit of it, gives them the right to build on burials, blow the tops of mountains, use child labor, blow off laws and engage in all manner of crimes against nature and humanity.

Then there was the comment left on the ”Incremental Change” post:

Big difference in those Wainiha lots.
No burials on the Dobbins lot. The north shore ohana has had it's day as KD has been exposed of telling falsehoods to support the NSO's position. 
Naupaka grows naturally on the beaches, and in the "rain forest" of Wainiha it grows like crazy...

First, I don’t think anyone can say there are “no burials on the Dobbins lot” when just 5 percent of it was surveyed to a depth of .067- 1.30 meters. Second, Caren Diamnd has not told falsehoods to support the NSO’s position, and so she has not been “exposed” and the NSO has not “had it’s [sic] day. And yes, naupaka does grow”like crazy,” especially when it’s watered and fertilized as is so often the case along our coastlines.