Neal Milner’s latest column in Civil Beat argues against nostalgia for and attachment to Hawaiʻi.
He says that we’re suffering from a “Stay-Put Syndrome that exaggerates Hawaiʻi as a special place while demeaning and patronizing former islanders who choose to live elsewhere.”
This is a theme Milner’s been milking for a while.
In 2018, he visited Hawaiʻi folks living in a retirement home in Oregon. The quality of care and lower cost on the Mainland led them to move, though they kept their sentimental “artifacts” and continued to wear aloha attire.
“Sure, the pull of Hawai‘i is strong for kupuna,” he wrote back then. “But stories, song, and political oratory about ‘ohana and home should not conceal the fact that there are good reasons why people who lived their life in Hawai‘i decide to spend their pau hana years somewhere else.”
This is all well and good. We shouldn’t be criticizing people who choose to leave Hawaiʻi. And far be it from me to harangue Boomers as they retire to Oregon.
Perhaps retirees gathered to eat pastries at the Vineyard Zippy’s or sipping coffee at the Liliha McDonald’s really are savage toward their peers who left. But I have not once heard a Millennial express a similar sentiment. I’m happy for my high school classmates who left to raise families or to work careers on the Mainland.
What Milner misses in his analysis is that Hawaiʻi really does suck in a lot of ways. The cost of housing is high. Transit stinks. Homelessness and crime overwhelm many public spaces.
These problems are the result of policy decisions, many of them made long before I was born. If you make it illegal to build the housing people want, prices will rise. If you decide to build a “second city” that’s a 45-minute commute away from the actual city (hello, Kapolei!), you’re going to produce daily traffic. And if you have a habit of letting criminals off with a warning after they shoot heroin or defecate on a playground, your parks won’t be any fun for kids or seniors.
I can understand residents who feel hopeless. The near future doesn’t look promising.
Hawaiʻi’s population declined for eight years, and nobody thinks that tomorrow it will become a natalist paradise. Nor is Hawaiʻi going to build housing at a fever pace, despite Gov. Josh Green’s best efforts. And Hawaiʻi isn’t going to become Silicon Valley, no matter what its technology boosters say.
But arguing these points is to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
We really can make life easier for large families. We can build housing. And we can improve on our ranking as the worst state to do business in. Not only can we; we should.
A year after Milner visited his friends in an Oregon retirement home, I was 28 years old, writing for Civil Beat, questioning whether a young person should stay or go. I recognized that while some chose to leave, others were forced to leave in large part because of the conditions they inherited.
“These people deserve a home which does not expel them,” I wrote. “And our leaders are responsible for maintaining that home.”
There’s nothing wrong with leaving a place and having fond memories of it. Milner thinks these memories are mirages, asserting that “the Stay-Put Syndrome tries to perpetuate a world that no longer exists and that in some ways never really existed at all.”
Nostalgia can be a lie, and memory always distorts. But there really was a better Hawaiʻi — and we can remember, if we choose to.
There were decades when growth in the state of Hawaiʻi outpaced national growth. There were decades when we built much more housing than we do today. And there were decades when families could afford to buy homes and raise lots of children. Those children could then start families of their own, and they could support mom and dad in retirement.
It’s true that this world no longer exists. But it’s wrong for Milner to say that this world never existed at all.
Such willful forgetting lets a whole generation off the hook for their leadership or lack thereof. And such willful forgetting blinds the present generation to the opportunity before them.
Hawaiʻi’s present problems are real, but they are not inevitable. They can be solved.
We can look to the past without nostalgia, but then we should move into the future without fear.
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