This post raises a bunch of different issues that may seem unrelated, but I think they are related with regards to what we want our society, our environment, our story to be.
I had the honor of being in Professor Mari Matsuda’s class while I was attending law school. The class was called, “Organization for Social Change.” Aside from the formal lessons of the class, I also learned things from Professor Matsuda more on an informal basis (or not necessarily part of the syllabus).
During one of our classes, Professor Matsuda described how it is a shame that we will have to teach our daughters that they cannot trust everyone that they meet.
I don’t think I really understood what Professor Matsuda was describing when she first mentioned it. But, after further thought, and from my personal experience, what she described continues to have deeper and deeper meaning for me.
On a separate, but related note, there was recently an “potentially armed person” who was at or near the University of Hawaiʻi. In response to the alert received about this danger, my daughter’s school took necessary precautions and practiced safety protocols to ensure that they would be safe in the event of such an intruder. After a couple of hours after the alert was sent, the person was apprehended.
I am thankful that the person was caught before anyone was hurt. I am thankful that my daughter’s school practiced safety protocols. I am thankful that my daughter’s school knows what to do to be safe. But at the same time, it is core-shakenly disturbing that this is what we need to teach our keiki nowadays.
And this may seem like a far reach of how the issue of big corporations scooping up natural (limited) resources and disregarding the community’s voice, but for me, it is all the same: enough already. No means no. People over profits. I don’t want to have to tell my keiki that we cannot drink water because it was diverted to keep the grass green on a golf course. I don’t want my keiki to live in fear because of new the norm of increasingly more hurricanes every year due to climate change. I don’t want to have to tell my keiki that profits are more important than people.
That is NOT the society that I want our keiki to live in. That is NOT the environment that I want our keiki to live in. That is NOT the story that I want to tell our keiki.
What kind of society do you want for the generations to come? What kind of environment do you want for our children to live in?