After reading “Silent Majority Speaks Up (April 23),” I reflected that if you live in a place long enough, patterns do repeat themselves. Before Kaluakoi happened or the Kaluakoi Sheraton Hotel was built, the land use commission held a meeting at the Kaunakakai School cafeteria to listen to community input. That particular silent majority was mostly Hawaiians whose concerns centered then, as now, on the precious and limited water resources of Molokai. Many old timers there remembered when enterprising outsiders permanently ruined Palaau wells by over-pumping and sucking up salt water, and they were concerned about diverting water from the island’s main aquifer to the dry West End.

Because they were told that they must come to the front of the room and speak into a microphone, the many Hawaiians who came to testify were silenced. However, a person from Maunaloa stood up saying he represented 2,000 pineapple workers who all wanted development because of the jobs it represented. One person who declared that she would, "rather clean the white man’s toilets than go on welfare.” With the closure of pineapple production on Molokai imminent, every person in the room could sympathize with her need for employment opportunities.

However, time shows that the people who rallied for that particular development mostly moved somewhere else. The promised jobs are long gone, but the development and the resources to sustain it continue.

As a teacher of our island’s youth, I am so proud to see young men and women as well as our kupuna no longer silenced by the challenge of speaking in front of groups of people and even into microphones for the ‘aina that they cherish.  

I am also pleased to see the people displaced by this latest closure, who want to be proactive about future choices for Molokai, come together. Nevertheless, blaming their neighbors who spoke out for their own strongly held convictions seems unnecessarily divisive. We all live on Molokai. We are a community of friends and ohana.

Thank goodness for Walter Ritte and others like him who do not allow us to fall into apathy. Whether you agree with his position or not is not the point. He and other leaders on our island keep the question about the future of our island where it belongs. Here in the Molokai community with the people who live here.

My aloha to my very special community,
Nancy Lawrence