On Earth Day, I joined a protest of the continual bombing of our island home. When I arrived, I saw what I thought were fellow protesters at the entrance to the Pohakuloa Training Area, the world’s largest military practice range at 133,000 acres.
Boy, was I in for a surprise after I took a place between an older woman in a housedress and tennis shoes swinging an over-sized U.S. flag, and a wiry man in jeans holding a sign that read “Support Our Troops.”
The man barked at me, “Are you an America hater?”
What the — ? I thought. Just then, I saw that the peace folks — my people — were on the other side of the street. Apparently, I had unwittingly planted myself amidst the three picketers who had come to protest us! But there was no law saying that I couldn’t stand with them, where more cars could see my sign. And besides, I support our troops, too. So I stayed.
“No, I love America,” I replied, “which is why I’m here exercising my First Amendment rights.”
The battle-axe positioned herself so that her flag hit me in the face. “You don’t know anything about the Constitution,” she sneered. “I know everything about the Constitution!”
The man taunted: “I bet you went to college, you think you’re so smart!”
As if on cue, the thunder of bombs exploded on the other side of the chain-link base fence.
Then, two yellow school buses turned in to the gate, on their Earth Day field trips. One little girl, about 11 years old smiled at me through the window, and held her fingers into a peace sign. I was somehow emboldened.
I called out to the man: “Why do you ask if I went to college?”
“Because you’re a leftist,” he snarled.
How to wrap my head around this guy’s logic? “So you think that being a leftist means a person went to college?”
He nodded, “They brainwashed you.”
“Well, I wish I could go to UH Manoa. But I can’t afford it. Normal people can’t afford college anymore. It’s only for the rich. You should be able to go to college. If that’s what you wanted.”
His face suddenly opened, as if accepting a compliment. He scanned my homemade sign that read “Bring War $ Home.”
“The professors are charging too much now,” he mansplained to me, the female.
I worked to maintain a conversational tone. “Back in the day, the government gave a lot of money to subsidize education. Now it all goes to this —” I jabbed my thumb in the air toward the bombing practice. “Not to the American people.”
“I can see your point,” he conceded loudly over the rumble of school bus idling at the security kiosk. “But people can still go to the state colleges.”
“They’re at least 10 grand a year.”
He was hard with resentment again. “I can’t believe that. That’s fake news.”
The woman thrust her flag forward to conceal my sign from passing cars. “You don’t know anything!” she yelled.
Wow. These people were profoundly bitter.
I sprang free of her flag’s suffocating fabric, as the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons shot pulverized depleted uranium into the soil of Pohakuloa (what a mockery of Earth Day).
It was clear I could talk no further. I couldn’t say how Trump’s $54 billion increase to military would rob us even further of education — not to mention health care, or food for hungry children. I couldn’t talk about Obama’s trillion-dollar nuclear-weapons program. I couldn’t talk about the Navy’s own admission that military exercises would kill or maim 9.6 million cetaceans in Hawaiian waters over the next five years.
My heart felt heavy, but not because of the Earth-ending destruction that our taxes fund. Rather, I was moved by the likelihood that this angry man might be secretly longing for an education he had always been denied. How could all this have happened in the richest country in the world?
Koohan Paik is a resident of Kukuihaele