Recently in my homeless news bin, I found the story about what the Honolulu City Council is planning to do with some homeless people. This brought back almost no memories of Hawaii, a place I have lived.
I think of myself as a bag of feelings and memories, all sort of floating around and through each other like the frothy, sudsy stuff in surf, with clams and jellyfish passing through.
Memories of Hawaii are some of the most vivid but least reliable, given the fact that I was taken from there to the mainland at the age of three and a half and have never been back.
The news story concerns homeless people who hang out at tourist spots in Honolulu, especially in the vicinity of famous Waikiki Beach. I remember being at Waikiki Beach and, at the time, not seeing anyone I’d now think was homeless. I saw my first homeless person back on the mainland at a Worcester, Mass., shopping center.
So, let’s say you were a tourist in 1952, and you were bound and determined to go someplace in the world that was a paradise, in that you wouldn’t be forced to see homeless people. I could have helped you back then. I could have told you to stay out of Worcester, Mass.
But it’s not 1952, Honolulu City Council. Hawaii is a state now. Your city is no longer in a territory among the far-flung holdings of the United States You made that choice, so you don’t get to be paradise anymore.
In fact, Hawaii wasn’t really paradise soon after Europeans and Americans arrived.
What Honolulu wants to do with the homeless people is force them to relocate to a city-built shelter on Sand Island, a piece of shabby island real estate next door to downtown Honolulu, which features industrial parks, waste treatment plants and one of the least popular beaches in all of Hawaii. (“It’s kind of smelly,” says one Yelper.)
It used to be called Quarantine Island. If you were an Asian contract laborer on your way to pick fruit and there was any sign of infectious disease on your ship, you had to spend time at some quarantine station or other. And Sand Island was one of them. Paradise already had seen smallpox back in Mark Twain’s day, so it was a thing.
Later the island was used as a dumping ground. The more tourists come to paradise, the more garbage they generate. It has to go somewhere.
World War II broke out, and Americans living in Hawaii looked around and were acutely aware of the large number of Japanese immigrants who had settled on the islands over the decades, and so one thing led to another, and hey, there’s this island here just being wasted as a dump, so Sand Island became the site of an internment camp. Still later, it was a POW camp. Not too paradise-y.
But there’s more. And this is the fact that makes the present situation part of a Grand Comedy in the old-time-y sense of “Whuh?” In the 1970s homeless people — homeless Native Hawaiian people, specifically — moved onto Sand Island and, under their own labor, cleaned it up so that it could be a decent place to live again. And seeing that they had done so, Honolulu decided Sand Island was now a pretty nice place to put industrial parks, etc., and so homeless people were evicted, without a thank you or compensation.
So when homeless people wanted to live there and built their own camp, they were forced out. Now that there are too many homeless people everywhere else, Honolulu wants to build a camp for them on the same island and force them onto it.
It’s all about power, isn’t it? You can’t camp there, we’ll build you a camp there. And put a fence around it and guards to keep you in. So we, not you, can preserve paradise. For our gain, not yours.