Being a HUGE fan of understatement, I loved state Senate President Colleen Hanabusa's pronouncement that she has seen little enthusiasm among her fellow legislators for rejecting a scheduled 36 percent pay raise. Were I facing a 36 percent pay raise, I, too, would have a difficult time generating any enthusiasm to reject it.

Mind, it would be a happy moral dilemma to wrestle with. I'm sure I would give it the old college try, but I'm afraid that in the end I still would fall short in the enthusiasm-generation effort. Sadly, in this bad economy where jobs are disappearing faster than snow on Mauna Kea at high noon, few of us are facing a 36 percent pay increase.

But what an enchanting way for Hanabusa to characterize the challenge facing lawmakers. Many things are hard to generate enthusiasm for: knife wounds, root canal, liver and onions, liver without onions, bronchitis, paper cuts, jury duty ... The list is endless. I would guess that turning down a 36 percent pay raise would be one of the hardest things in the world to generate enthusiasm for.

A lot of people are merely trying to generate enthusiasm for finding jobs at a time when many companies are downsizing, a certain wife among them. She is one of a growing army of folks who took “;voluntary separations”; from their previous places of employment.

Now, it would be cool for state legislators to reject their 36 percent pay increase as a show of solidarity with citizens who have either lost their jobs or have had to take pay cuts during these recessionary times. I think they would be viewed as something not unlike heroes. But Hanabusa rightly wonders why only state lawmakers are being asked to skip their pay hikes when such scheduled raises have been enthusiastically embraced by public servants in the executive and judicial branches. If raises are to be rejected, why can't the hurt be spread out over all government workers? And it's not like the legislators are giving themselves pay raises. The raises are set by the state salary commission, a really neat little government entity apparently set up to make it look like judges, the governor and legislators weren't simply increasing their own salaries at will.

How sweet is that? I bet a lot of people could generate enthusiasm for having regularly scheduled pay raises set by a salary commission instead of having to go in and harangue their bosses or sit through months of angry negotiations between their unions and management.

But I don't begrudge state legislators grabbing up their pay raise in both arms as though it were a lost puppy. I believe it was someone in the Bible, or perhaps the CEO of a major financial corporation, who said, “;Let he who has actually rejected a pay raise on moral grounds cast the first stone.”; The air was fairly free of flying stones that day.

Let's just hope that eventually we may all find ourselves on the horns of such a delightful dilemma.