When a Corlew gets TB...

In school news, Michael and I are in the final processes of getting our registration on. We got TB tests yesterday, which will be read on Monday. I need to bring in my passport to have it varified by the graduate chair, who has as of yet only seen a photocopy. And we're searching high and low for records of MMR vaccinations. Mom's been a great help with this, looking through her records, being a local contact for St. Benedict which may or may not have this on file. I was able to contact the MTSU Health Services Center, and they said they only had round one of my MMR on file. But the lady at the UH Health Services said that was fine; they could give me round two next week and I'll be on my way.



Michael's been a bit trickier. There's something wrong with the Oakland High phone system, so that it just hangs up whenever he tries to transfer to the office. He'll probably wind up having to get both rounds of the vaccine, but, they say after the first round they'll temporarily lift the health hold on his registration so he can go ahead and sign up for classes. So all's well, all told.



Michael finally got his speakers set up that he had gotten for free through some... thing... promotion? I forget. Thing is, he'd read the reviews online for them and they all complained about things like the cords not being long enough to set up the surround sound speakers in proper locations about the room. We have decided that these are people with large living rooms, because they set up nicely in ours. And now we have become people with a surround sound audio system. I never imagined I would be one of those people. When I told Michael this, he laughed and said, "Why? It's so cheap."



Anyway, a lot of you know we don't have a TV (and don't want one, so don't get any ideas for Christmas from that statement). And we don't have a stereo. So the surround sound now solely exists for the random DVD rental, or as in the case of last night, Homestar Runner viewing. Ah, love it.



Today, we're going to head out to the Aquarium in Waikiki. I think it's near a beach, which would mean we might see a beach today too. That would be a first. Ocean we have now seen from the top of Diamond Head. We even looked over a handrail in Ala Moana near the Aloha Tower and saw tropical fish in the water (that doesn't count as seeing ocean because that's where all the huge-ass ships dock, so you cannot see more than maybe... thirty or forty yards into the water). So today, we will see an aquarium, and maybe a beach if one presents itself.



But let me get back to part two of the series I've titled in my head 'Is it any wonder they hate us?' I had been told again and again before I came here that Native Hawaiians would not like me because I was white and an outsider. This was told to me with a kind of a... 'well, what are you gonna do?' sort of tone. I guess it just seems to me that we, or at least I, never bothered to learn the history here. So of course we, or at least I, would wonder why would I be an outsider from the same country, and second off, why would they hate white people so much?


There have been two things that have struck me about my own personal thought processes: One, I was flat out wrong about Haunani Trask. And I'm already embarrassed by my original assumptions. Granted, "well-spoken angry activist" is very high praise from me. It is kind of what I aspire to be. And she is those things. But she's also a historian with an incredible understanding of the story of her people. And she's a genius as far as I'm concerned with this encyclopedic knowledge of Hawaiian, national, and international law. I struggle to understand the full implications of legalese, making me all the more certain that we need an overhaul of our systems of law and politics if we are going to make them workable to the common person. At any rate, the second thing that surprises me repeatedly is how very little I know, and how very little it occurs to me that there is to know. It doesn't really shock me when I read about how the rich and powerful take advantage of the poor and marginalized. What shocks me each time I hear about these things is how it never occurred to me that it might be going on. It has never occurred to me to wonder about the Native people of Hawai'i. And now that it is on my mind, I can't help but think, "Why not?" And how many other people are out there being stepped on for my benefit and why is it still not occurring to me to wonder about them?


Haunani Trask makes a good point, and one that I've never before considered. The United States is a settler society. The Constitution that we look to to protect people's rights was written by settlers who were living on land they had stolen, and that they felt they had every right to be a free people on. The rights to life, liberty, and property did not apply to the indigenous people. And even now there is nothing in our Constitution that protects them. There is nothing in our Constitution that protected Hawai'i from us. There is nothing in our Constitution that protects Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or anyone else from us. Our Constitution protects us from us, and us from other people, and that's about it.


So the Native Hawaiians are looking to international law to find some protection. Did you know that Native Hawaiians do not have the same rights and autonomy as the Native Americans on the mainland? There are no reservations, there is no land set aside for them, there is no self-governance. There are systems within the government that conquered them that are supposed to be taking care of them, but those systems are run by our government, meaning we are determining what is best for them. Even right now, in the paper this morning, non-Hawaiian residents are suing the Office of Hawaiian affairs for using money set aside for the benefit of Native Hawaiians to creating a voter registry of Native Hawaiians that would be used to help determine what steps Native Hawaiians should take toward a Native Hawaiian governing entity. And why are these white guys suing over something that clearly doesn't concern them? They say it's because they think it's racist that they wouldn't get to vote too. But really, why do you think? When it comes to Hawai'i, we don't have the Native Hawaiians' best interests at heart. We have money at heart. So yeah, they're looking to international human rights laws for help. And really, I think they deserve to have third party intervention.