Hanauma visitors need more parking

Kudos to the Friends of Hanauma Bay who recently did a super job of cleaning up both sides of Kalanianaole Highway near the bay turn-off road.

What distresses us who live in the neighborhood is excess of overflow parking along that same highway, where the many tourists who come to visit Hanauma bay have no alternative but to leave their cars. Usually by 9 a.m. the park access road sign reads "full," and cars line the shoulders of the highway for some distance -- a dangerous situation. There is not even a place near the entrance for drivers to drop off passengers.

Obviously, an alternative parking lot is needed -- the sooner, the better. Then guards now forcing vehicle drivers to "keep moving" could be used in a more helpful way.

The situation is critical. Let's act.

How many Iraqi schools are fired on?

"Fighter jet strafes elementary school" (Associated Press story, Nov. 5). Nope. It's not Iraq. It's not the usual "collateral damage." This was a school in the United States. The plane was engaged in a training exercise.

If an American warplane can do this in America, what must it be like in a war zone? How many Iraqi schools, hospitals, churches have been bombed, strafed and destroyed -- by "accident" and without so much as a mention in our media?

How many will be?

Uneven stones ruin Waikiki walkways

I spend a lot of time in Hawaii enjoying the good weather year-round. When the Kuhio improvement project was started, it appeared that the environs would be more pleasant and the walkways would be more accommodating.

As the project nears completion, the added trees and grass are becoming visually enjoyable even though there is still work ongoing. The walkways, however, are a problem. The stone used might be nice for a patio in someone's back yard, but the unevenness presents a danger. These stones are not most suited for public walkways, which are in constant use by many elderly people and are also a danger to everyone else using them. The stones' unevenness can cause tripping, and the gaps between stones can cause heels to catch.

The unevenness also is a real problem when the weather is not clear. Rain in recent weeks has made the walkways like a bunch of little lakes and streams. The water seems to stand on the walkways and not run into the gutters like it should.

I hope that when the project is finished, most of the other hazards will disappear, but I am afraid we are stuck with uneven, dangerous walkways.

We need to expand meaning of morality

Those who use the phrase "the morality election" have a narrow definition of morality. Before we embrace it, we had better include dialogue on a host of issues, such as: Is war moral? Is overconsumption moral? Is the early sexualization of children by our culture moral? Is unequal access to health care moral? Are we being good stewards of the earth?

The Christian fundamentalists do not have a monopoly on moral values.

Book about annexation deserves longer review

Burl Burlingame's short review ("Isle Pages," Oct. 31) of Noenoe Silva's much-anticipated book, "Aloha Betrayed," is puzzling. I wonder if he got past the "scary cover," as he calls it, to actually read the book (the cover, in my interpretation, expresses the resistance to colonization that remarkably persists despite all efforts to silence and discredit it).

To call an extremely important work by an emerging native scholar "angry" is more than a little passˇ. The fact that nearly every native Hawaiian signed a petition protesting annexation and that that information has been hidden or ignored until Silva's archival work is proof of the power of the dominant colonial narrative. We have all been taught to believe that Hawaiians simply gave up and allowed their nation to be stolen. Thank goodness for scholars like Silva who are doing the painstaking work necessary to uncover, analyze and document the multitudes of creative resistance strategies employed by her ancestors.

I can only hope that the Star-Bulletin will give this book the intelligent, full review it warrants. Many people have been waiting a long time for this information.