Like Aaron Stene (letters-to-the editor, Feb. 11) I am incredulous that Judge Takase acquitted the protesters who were arrested for purposely blocking the public access road to the summit of Mauna Kea. Her rationale for acquittal — they were acting for a “greater good”— is absolutely mind-boggling.
I could have understood a reprimand and a suspension of sentence, but an acquittal means she believes they were justified in deliberately breaking the law. In granting them an acquittal, she obviously allowed her own personal biases to cloud her legal judgment.
No one would argue that civil law is not often in conflict with moral law. Sophocles’ magnificent tragedy “Antigone,” written and performed almost 2,500 years ago, has such a conflict as its central theme. I admire characters like Antigone and real people like Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Cesar Chavez, Aung San Suu Kyi, Malala Yousufzai, and many others who believed in a cause greater than themselves and protested against injustices. The injustices against which they protested — the Vietnam War, apartheid, racial prejudice, gender prejudice, gross economic inequality, and tyranny — defined who they were. They knew the risks they were taking and were prepared to accept responsibility for their actions in order to bring about what they perceived to be a greater good.
Judge Takase, unfortunately, has defined the greater good within the narrow confines of the beliefs of the TMT protesters, some of whom are angry sovereigntists who see the TMT as a vehicle for furthering their cause, some of whom are probably well-intentioned but so immersed in their limited interpretation of events and beliefs that they cannot accept the validity of any point of view or culture other their own, and some of whom are committed mainly to their own self-aggrandizement. None of them seem to be able to differentiate between metaphorical truth and rational truth or between propaganda and rational argument. Judge Takase should have helped them to see that, but she chose to endorse their views instead.
No matter what their motivations or beliefs, they are still law-breakers, and they should have been treated accordingly. There is plenty of blame to go around for the current impasse — the state, the governor, the DLNR, the University of Hawaii, the protesters themselves.
Judge Takase’s recent ruling might be the final straw in allowing the tyranny of a vocal minority to hold sway over the rest of us.
Where will it end? If a judge can exonerate law-breakers because she believes they were acting for the greater good, then any of us, with no fear of prosecution, can block public access to places that represent values which we personally don’t accept.
Churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, gun stores, banks, TV stations, newspaper headquarters, Internet dating sites, strip clubs, bookstores, police stations, theaters, science labs, abortion clinics, free health clinics, tax offices, dolphin pools, zoos, the DMV, military recruitment centers, schools and universities, humane societies, hospitals, marijuana dispensaries, pharmacies, taverns, fisheries, slaughterhouses, construction sites — all of these and more clearly would be offensive to someone’s definition of the greater good.
We live in a pluralistic society — one in which all voices deserve to be heard, one in which accommodations and compromise and consensus feasibly can lead to agreement. Ultimately, however, a decision has to be made that serves the majority of those voices. Then we can honestly say that we are deciding for the greater good. Before touring the Subaru Telescope a few months ago, I watched a video of the opening ceremonies, which took place in the late ’90s. Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians joined together to celebrate the momentous achievement that its construction represented.
What has happened since then to turn astronomy into a “desecration” rather than a celebration?
At a Friends of the Keck astronomy lecture last month, an astronomer referred to Mauna Kea as a cathedral, a holy place, a platform for peering into the night sky and seeing both past and future. How can this not be for the greater good? How can this not be sacred to all of us who think and feel and want to understand how we fit into the grand scheme of things?
I wish that Judge Takase and all of the protesters would watch Neal DeGrasse Tyson’s Carl- Sagan-inspired series titled “Cosmos.” If they watched it with an open mind, I think they could at least begin to understand why so many of us want to live long enough to learn what the images captured by the TMT can tell us about the vast, beautiful, and mysterious universe in which we live — one which contains real (not symbolic) miracles.
I hope they could come to understand why scientific revelations are spiritual as well as rational in nature. And if that could happen, they, too, would embrace the building of the TMT on our beautiful mountain.
Kerrill J. Kephart is a resident of Kamuela
My Turn opinions are those of the writer and not of West Hawaii Today