• Supports Stan but goes step further • Missing home Supports Stan but goes step further We support Stan Godes’ Letter and Opinion in the forum Oct. 3rd. We take it one step further. We are “criminals” if we smoke
• Supports Stan but goes step further
• Missing home
Supports Stan but goes step further
We support Stan Godes’ Letter and Opinion in the forum Oct. 3rd. We take it one step further. We are “criminals” if we smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, and use drugs as teenagers. We are criminals if we smoke pot and use illegal drugs as adults. Our parents and teachers had the right to tell us to stop when we were teenagers. No one, not any police or government agency has the right to tell us to stop as adults. This is our freedom to choose as Americans. We choose what we do with our bodies, speech and mind. “The War On Drugs,” “Prohibition,” will never work and because of it most of us will continue to be criminals.
Tosh Maclaine
Kapa‘a
Missing home
As I sit here behind a relatively drab desk in Cleveland, Ohio, my thoughts and fingertips inevitably wander to the keyboard of the computer that can stretch (in this case) almost halfway around the world.
I recently came across your website and the sights and smells of my island home from so many years ago flooded back.
I started delving through your archives and came across an editorial from August the 15th of this year and the so-called æGreat Blackout” that hit me and millions of others. As Cleveland was bathed in darkness, I remembered back to that most memorable portion of my life, living in the back of the Blockbuster Video in Waipouli with my adapted Hawaiian family. We tempered the storm together and lived in the aftermath of the rebuilding efforts. After sixteen weeks of shuffling between homes, I felt it was best to leave Kaua‘i and find a dry bed and a shower that wasn’t made from a gardenhose and plywood walls…
Our East Coast blackout? That was nothing … I prepared myself for weeks of darkness and told myself that it would be easy if it was only a couple of weeks long.
Briefly, neighbors that never talked streamed out of their homes, waiting for the power to come back on. We talked, stargazed, and got to know each other a little better. One of the children from down the street marveled at how many stars there were in the heavens. I told her that this was nothing. I smiled at her and told her that the best (and ONLY) place to truly stargaze was from a beach on Kaua‘i, where the stars are so bright they cast shadows on the beach. Within 12 hours the power was back on and life returned to the relative normalcy that an Ohio summer brings.
I think of Kaua‘i often, and every September 11, I remember how awful, exciting, and life-changing that that day was. I was east of Pittsburgh two years ago when the plane crashed in that field outside of Shanksville. I could smell jet fuel in the air. I was in Manhattan a few months later and stared at the twisted carnage that was the World Trade Center complex. Although our specific September 11 has been overshadowed by something far more tragic, I’ll always remember the sights, sounds, and smells of the Garden Isle; I think I truly became who I am today because of my experiences there. Thank you, Kaua‘i, for sharing your particular beauty with me. When my son is a little older and able to appreciate what Hawai‘i has to offer, I hope to bring him back with me and let him see where his father truly understood what “beauty” meant for the first time!
Brian M. Lumley
North Olmsted, Ohio
