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Hawaiʻi Scene on Social

What Hawaiʻi graduation ceremony isnʻt complete without "Piko Mango," "Lilikoi" and "Cheehoo"?

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<title>Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Reading local names at graduation</title>

Today's social post from ekahi808 will help you prepare for Hawai‘i's upcoming graduation season.

Hawai‘i Scene on Social: Reading local names at graduation

What Hawaiʻi graduation ceremony isnʻt complete without &quot;Piko Mango,&quot; &quot;Lilikoi&quot; and &quot;Cheehoo&quot;? 

Higa headshot white shirt square

Sterling Higa

Government & Politics

Columnists

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Ben Sasse is bleeding from the face."}]

He’s seated across from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, 

, and he pauses to note it. He’s dying of stage 4 pancreatic cancer. One side effect of the treatment is that his body can’t grow skin.

“Yeah, you look terrible,” says Douthat.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"“Thank you,” says Sasse with a smile."}]

Since his diagnosis, Sasse has appeared on 

 stage, and a parade of podcasts. He uses the time to say what most politicians never dare to.

He talks about faith. He quotes R.C. Sproul. He discusses Tocqueville with the ease of someone who has actually read him.

Sasse is a two-term Republican Senator from Nebraska, a Harvard graduate, a Yale PhD in History. He voted to impeach Donald Trump and took the consequences. Though popular with voters in his home state, he left the Senate to serve as President of the University of Florida.

Now he spends his last days making one argument: American political life has gone badly wrong. Not because the wrong party is winning. Because the whole enterprise has lost its bearings.

Sasse starts with something most politicians would rather ignore: the pace of technological change. Previous economic transformations — industrialization, electrification — unfolded across generations. This one won’t. Robotics and automation will wipe out whole careers within a single working life.

Sasse sees a second shift: disembodied consciousness, the way screens let people leave their world. Families are breaking apart. Communities are dissolving. The local ties — churches, civic groups, the small-scale institutions Edmund Burke called “little platoons” — that help people absorb hard times are being stripped away. The formation of souls and citizens is at risk, and government is mostly ignoring it in favor of clickbait and rage.

He thinks our loves should be ordered, first to God, then to those nearest us, rippling outward from family to neighborhood to state to nation. Caring about a national political party more than your own community isn’t just confused. It’s a disorder of affection.

What’s true of the nation is true in Hawai'i. The legislature introduces three thousand bills a year. How many of those take the large challenges seriously? The demographic shifts, the cost pressures squeezing local families, the slow hemorrhage of young people off the Islands? The floor speeches and press releases gesture toward these problems, but the lawmaking doesn’t match the problem.

Sasse’s example suggests why. He can sit for an hour-long interview on dense political and theological matters because he has a clear philosophy — a disciplined way of working through problems. It also gives him the power to persuade, which is the precondition for coordinated action.

The founders studied rhetoric and philosophy with the same care they gave the law, because republican government runs on argument and clear speech. Most of Hawai‘i’s lawmakers couldn’t sustain an interview like Sasse’s, and the laws show it. There’s no clear direction. No will to rally the public. Few signs that anyone has thought hard about what government is for. What fills the vacuum is performance: press releases, floor speeches written for social media, outrage timed to the news cycle.

Sasse has a simple framework for what a coherent politics looks like. He describes four ways of valuing government, measured in cheers. No-cheer people — hardcore libertarians — don’t understand that government exists to secure liberty. Three-cheer people believe in a state that controls everything. Republicans, he says, are the one-cheer party. Democrats are the two-cheer party. Each has an extreme wing. Hawai‘i’s loudest voices are at the extremes.

What we lack are the one-cheer leaders: those who see government as necessary but flawed, able to secure order but not to deliver salvation.

Government should do a small number of important things well. It should get out of the way of the little platoons. It should never present itself as the path to utopia. Hawai‘i’s government casting itself as humanity’s last best hope has always been faintly comic.

Sasse’s sharpest line comes when he describes what voters already sense about the way their leaders talk.

They know it’s bullshit, he says — and they don’t want to be lied to. Why can’t politics do a small number of important, long-term things?

There is something clarifying about a man making that argument while bleeding from the face. He has no election to win, no caucus to protect, and by his own reckoning, weeks or months to live. What he’s chosen to do with his time is sit down and think hard about what government is and isn’t for, and what we’ve lost by confusing the two.

In watching Ben Sasse die, Hawai‘i might learn something about how to live.

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Ben Sasse Getty Images 1231346544

<title>Ben Sasse is dying in public</title>

The former U.S. senator from Nebraska is talking about big ideas everywhere he can as pancreatic cancer takes his life. Hawai‘i's politicians could learn from what he has to say about government doing fewer things well, says ASD opinion columnist Sterling Higa.

Ben Sasse is dying in public

Daily Smile

"You know the rules, Pablo. You stay in your lane and I'll stay in mine..."

Smile 26 5 18

<title>Daily Smile: Monday, May 18, 2026</title>

Daily Smile: Monday, May 18, 2026

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Katie Helland

Aloha Spirit

Arts & Entertainment

As the sun sets, the floating lanterns at Ala Moana Beach start to glow from the light of the candles they carry as part of Shinnyo Lantern Floating Hawai‘i, a Memorial Day ceremony. Jacob Kam had watched the event on television for years but attended in person for the first time more than a decade ago, while he was still a student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

Kam, who is a cancer survivor, sat next to the stage so he could see the thousands of glowing lanterns as they were released into the ocean.

He didn’t set one afloat, but he experienced a moment of peace.

“It's a mood that's kind of indescribable,” he told Aloha State Daily. “It kind of puts you in just that serene calm. It's almost an otherworldly experience. It’s hard to explain, but it felt like this serene calm and peace that I don't think comes around too much nowadays — that's really more precious now that the world's kind of crazy.”

On Monday, May 25, thousands will gather again at Ala Moana Beach to remember fallen service members and loved ones and release floating lanterns as part of the 28th annual Memorial Day ceremony. The free public event is officiated by Shinnyo-en, an international Buddhist community with Japanese roots. It is presented by the group’s locally based community support arm Nā Lei Aloha Foundation.

Kam and his mother, Betty Lou Kam, are two of the event’s many volunteers.

“It's been a Memorial Day tradition for the last few years,” he said. “I don't really have a Memorial Day tradition per se for myself, but this is kind of my Memorial Day tradition ever since I've started volunteering.”

From 2020 to 2022, the ceremony was observed as a pre-recorded television and internet broadcast due to the 

. But when it was announced the event was headed back to the beach, he wanted to get involved as a volunteer.

“And then the next year, mom signed up, too,” his mother added with a laugh.

Over the years, their volunteer roles have changed. Initially, they assembled lanterns. This year, they will be at the shoreline to light the candles in each lantern before families release them into the ocean.

“The temple does a lot about many rivers, one ocean,” she said. “And that's incredible, because when you're standing there — Jacob and I, we actually stand at the coastline and light lanterns. When you're standing there, you feel like you're part of the ocean of people. It's an incredible feeling, because we're all sharing the same feeling.”

“You’d call that a chicken skin kind of moment,” he added.

His mother also likes to help families who are picking up individual lanterns. Each family is invited to decorate their lantern and remember loved ones.

“What happens is we’re all gathered in a tent, and when people pick up, they come to us, and we say, ʻDo you need help?’” she said. “Some people need help because they're still torn with grief and memories. They sit down, and we tell them what to do. Sometimes you step aside and let them cry or let them feel happy, and you share a moment with them.”

Later in the evening, as she lights candles, she sometimes sees families she helped earlier in the day.

“That is the chicken skin moment when somebody says, ‘You helped me,’” she said.

Volunteers are still needed to refurbish lanterns after the ceremony, starting May 30. Sign up to 

The refurbished lanterns will return to the water next year.

“They carry the messages from thousands of people, because the messages are put on the lanterns,” she said. “These lanterns get refreshed with a new mission of taking more messages to those who are gone, but well-loved and still with us in spirit.”

Want to participate? Individual lanterns are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Learn about how to get 

add a message to the collective remembrance lantern

For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up 

Shinnyo Lantern Floating Hawaiʻi

<title>Why these volunteers return to Memorial Day lantern floating ceremony</title>

Shinnyo Lantern Floating Hawaiʻi is a Memorial Day ceremony that brings thousands to the water’s edge at Ala Moana Beach. Jacob Kam and his mother, Betty Lou Kam, have been volunteers for several years and share what keeps them coming back.

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