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Hawaii’s World
ONE of my many sources of pride in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin is the way it has stood fast -- for all the 55 years I have been with it -- against legalized gambling in Hawaii. Legalizing gambling
in islands would
be a mistakeWe editorial-paged against it.
We front-paged against it.
We joined with our churches in shouting it down...and succeeded.
Hawaii is a better place today because the hucksters and politicians who annually advocate it have been turned back again and again. Thus we remain a family vacation place.
Las Vegas has boomed to more than half again the size of Hawaii's hotel establishment. But most of our people wouldn't want that anyway.
Moderated growth builds healthier communities. We have it and handle it pretty well, thanks to good state and county planning and development controls.
Last year we had record tourism arrivals and income -- growing gradually from there is quite enough for a healthy Hawaii.
Las Vegans are what they are. We are what we are. It would cheapen our family vacation image to slip in a few casinos.
Many islanders fly to Las Vegas to gamble -- some more than once a year. I like Vegas myself. But I like it where it is -- in Nevada, not Hawaii.
We have a community/family atmosphere totally different -- and better for growing up in -- from the glitzy casino surroundings situated seven hours northeast by plane. Our crime rate is low.
Yes, we have illegal crap games and illegal cockfight betting, but there are quantitative and qualitative differences between those and the casinos that sing a siren song we'd rather our kids didn't live in the midst of.
Governor Cayetano started the latest furor over gambling by flying off to the Bahamas to look at its aquarium but looking in also on the operation of Sun International, which would like to open a casino-hotel at Ko Olina in West Oahu.
The governor says he hasn't decided whether he is for it. But one of the people who accompanied him to the Caribbean was his close friend and former assistant, Charles Toguchi, who acknowledges a nonpaid relationship with the Sun organization.
TOGUCHI is advising it on how to set up a scholarship fund to benefit Hawaii students with gambling proceeds. More simply: Toguchi is telling it how to put the wolf in sheep's clothing. Since he is a former superintendent of public education here, this is especially shocking.
A full page ad showed a smiling high school graduate in cap and gown, a diploma in her hand. Its headline boasted: "A Tuition-Free College Education for Every Kid in Hawaii."
Paid for how? By losers, of course. Lots of them. Such big losers that they enrich the casino owners and yet leave money in addition for college tuitions.
The ad sponsors call themselves the Hawaii Coalition for Economic Diversity.
We have a lot of winning avenues to economic diversity -- high tech, biotechnology, aquaculture, diversified agriculture, astronomy, alternate energy production, space tests, health spas, national and international sports events, filmmaking, meetings and conventions, education, the arts.
We can only lose with a diversification that depends on losers.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.