There once was a green lawn in Hilo that seemed to go on forever.
A velvet field of grass so nice and perfect that you wondered how it was still here, untouched. You secretly wished it would go unnoticed by all the evil, developing eyes, but you knew it wouldn’t.
I knew such natural beauty wouldn’t last long, so I walked on it, ran through it and loved it as long as I could.
But now it’s gone, fenced in, painted with white chalk lines, filled up with soccer moms yelling at their kids kicking white balls around, on my wonderful lawn. I grow sick whenever I drive by it.
There is a place just as precious outside Honokaa, an untouched neighborhood where people can breathe in the scenery of paradise.
Soon it will be gone.
Fenced in, painted with white chalk lines, with blaring lights and ugly baseball bleachers. No one wants this baseball field but the guy with the contract to build it. The evil developing eye.
Kona, too, is built up right to the edge, the problem is there’s no parking, so few can actually get near the town.
There are scenes like this everywhere, emerald rolling hills, sweet waterfalls and shining white beaches, sitting under the sun doing nothing at all but showing off the beauty Mother Nature.
Pure innocence basking in the sun.
But it kills some people to see this beauty. When they see nature they start to itch, it bugs them right down to their money-grubbing soul. They start scheming, figuring a way to chop it up and sell it to the highest bidder. They are wolves with a clipboard and hardhat.
They hide this unnatural itch by calling it Progress.
There are two kinds of Progress, one is spiritual where you grow closer to your God, the other is materialistic where you grow closer to your car payment.
This type of Progress is defined as “building cement structures that are totally unnecessary for the sole purpose of making a buck.”
The world is choked with it.
It is a disease carried by developers, land speculators, and contractors with a cousin in the county building.
These are the people who stole my lawn, the ones trying to build an obnoxious baseball field near Honokaa, the ones chopping down old trees in Kapaau and putting dangerous moorings in Keauhou Bay. They are sick with Progress.
The only cure is the antidote of care.
We had a serious outbreak recently, a giant wart starting to form on Mauna Kea called the TMT. The healing medicine of aloha cured it and it went away.
But the pockmarks of progress can be seen from Waikiki to all the cities of the world. It is an epidemic.
Wherever there is beauty there is a beast, wherever there are nice old trees there are chainsaws, and wherever there is a beautiful lawn there will be soccer moms sitting on folding chairs yelling at their kids.
Dennis Gregory is a writer, artist, singer, teacher and Kailua-Kona resident who mixes truth, humor and aloha in his bi-weekly column. He can be reached at Makewavess@yahoo.com