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Under the Sun Cynthia Oi |
Slants and angles
scatter acceptance,
toleranceABOUT a dozen or so people were ahead of me at the tomato stand, all clutching bulging bags while waiting patiently for the blast of the air horn that signals the start of sales at a farmers market. Although I'd managed to get near the front of the line, I was still muttering about having to wait.
A woman nearby chided her gray-haired companion, complaining that he wasn't holding her place behind me while she made her selections from stacks of wooden crates filled with yellow, purple and crimson globes and teardrops of tomatoes.
Behind his glasses, the man's eyes narrowed. He stuck out his chin, his thin lips forming a moue beneath a brushy mustache. He shoved his hands into the pockets of jeans, then rocked forward on the balls of his feet and growled.
"I stoot zin linez for hourz for a hef off loaf off brret in Vorld Var Tsu," he said in a deliberate clip. "I vowt I't neva standt zin linez like zat againz."
Whoa, I thought. If I were the woman, I'd let it slide. What I considered a minor irritation in my life seemed to have evoked memories of a horrible incident in his.
I was tempted to ask him about it, but you can't do stuff like that. Too bad, because I wanted to hear the story, thinking his experience would help me understand something I know little about.
But would it have, really? He probably could have recounted in detail what it was like to stand in place anxiously as bread was parceled out in meager amounts. I imagine that the small ration staved off hunger, maybe only for a day or two. Still, unless I had been there, how deep would be my comprehension?
Human beings have an ability to sympathize, to share or understand the feelings and ideas of others. But we also have an unwitting tendency to inject our own perspectives into situations and occurrences, inserting our own values that perhaps cause us to miss another's marks -- maybe not by much, but enough to make a difference.
So when a federal judge who oversaw the settlement of a discrimination suit recently against Kamehameha Schools chose to interpret the concept of hanai, which my Pukui vocabulary dictionary defines as to "feed, nourish, support, adopt," some Hawaiians objected. How could he, a haole man, apply his Western views and what they considered to be a foreign alignment of laws to their practices?
I see their point. Yet the laws of this nation and all its powers are what surround them. Until the Hawaiian people capture a framework that encompasses their values and ideas, they must tackle these issues in that scheme, frustrating as that may be.
What makes us tick is unique to ourselves, formulated by internal and external forces, a conglomeration of encounters and personal knowledge, observations and reactions. What we care about, what becomes important to each of us is derived from all of these. The prism through which we see others should be reconciled and readjusted through time and experiences. What is dangerous is refusing to tune in and modify.
Adopting an arrogance of position puts up barriers, limiting the capacity to understand what may be unfamiliar and different. So religious conservatives judge those whose outlooks veer away from their own as immoral and deviant, liberals assess Bible-thumping right-wingers as intolerants, African Americans corral whites as bigots, locals criticize mainland newcomers as overbearing, mainland newcomers herd locals as torpid and ignorant.
Even more dangerous are those who would manipulate a communal disposition to reach an end. We'll see more of this as the presidential election accelerates next year. Republicans and Democrats will continue to break the electorate into categories, hoping to gather "interest" groups like so many slices from a loaf, hoping we'll forget there ought to be enough bread for all of us.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976. She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.