When I tell folks that I live in Hawai'i, the response is almost always a predictable sigh of envy. I know what they're thinking: days spent lounging under coconut palms at the side of the beach, the womb-warm water lapping on skin warmed by the tropical sun, someone playing ukelele in the background while a scantily clad girl passes out mai tais.
That's not the Hawai'i that I live in. If you haven't been here since the early 80's, or if you've never ventured outside of Waikiki for anything longer than a car drive up to the North Shore, you haven't really been to Hawai'i. That idyllic place of old Bob Hope movies and awful Baywatch reunion shows doesn't exist. Paradise always gets screwed up when humans are involved. Remember Adam and Eve?
Here's a piece of Hawai'ian trivia I bet you didn't know: the overwhelming majority of our children are currently destined to be uneducated drug addicts. So many, in fact, that the state can't do a damned thing about it.
Our schools suck. Private schools are the rule here, rather than the exception. Which means the public schools are populated by kids whose parents can't afford private school or don't care about their kid's education, or both.
Drugs are rampant here. Hawai'i has the worst crystal meth problem in the nation. Here in the tropics, we call it "ice." Ironic, huh? Almost without exception, our prisoners are ice addicts and, not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of burglaries, robberies and auto theft are related to turning stolen goods into ice.
Raids on drug houses are common-place on the Big Island of Hawai'i but not on O'ahu, where I live, or any of the other neighboring islands. Why? Because it's too big for our police to handle. Because sometimes our police are part of the problem. Because we are a state that is spread out over several islands separated by hundreds of miles of water. Because cities like congested, concrete-filled Waikiki are surprisingly much easier to patrol (and are consequently patrolled far better) than rural communities like mine.
And yet rural areas like mine are havens for drug manufacturers. Here, our police officers drive their own cars during duty because the department can't afford to buy any more. Our kids take the public bus to school because the school district doesn't have its own bus system. The public library is housed at the nearby high school, and the nearest fire department is two towns (and 25 minutes) away.
This is the real Hawai'i. This is where drug dealers set up shop in the jungle along booby-trapped trails. This is where the foliage is so lush, you almost don't notice the 6-foot high marijuana plants growing just a few yards off the road. This is where unemployment is so rampant and homelessness so common that our beach parks are populated with semi-permanent tent cities packed with two and sometimes three families per tent.
What to do? Our legislators have been coming up with ideas like drug testing students and punishing parents whose children skip school. I'm all in favor of both.
But wait! Before I get a slew of e-mail from bleeding-heart liberals condemning my perpetually conservative politics, let me tell you another piece of Hawai'ian trivia that I bet you didn't know: It's the Democrats who came up with these ideas. Our legislature is overwhelmingly populated by Democrats. Our governors have been exclusively Democrats until this last election when we finally -- finally! -- got a Republican in the governor's mansion. (And as another first: a woman!)
Guess it just goes to show you that even Democrats start thinking clearly when the problems get bad enough.
10:40:22 AM ; 
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