 | VoicePost 918K 4:36 | (no transcription available) |
Akaka Bill Supporters Ignore Key Questions
There's a lot of debate and rhetoric going on these days, but here are a few questions the supporters of the Akaka bill never touch. They are major issues:
- Is this bill going to be good for all the citizens of Hawai'i — Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians alike? The answer has to be a resounding no. Its benefits are race-based. Divisiveness helps no one.
- Is there really a class of people called "Hawaiians"? Not really. Percentage Hawaiians — 50 percent or whatever — have no historical origin other than having been created by federal and state statutes.
- Is someone who carries 90 percent other than Hawaiian blood really a Hawaiian? Again, not really. Those Hawaiians who keep showing up on the welfare rolls, prison statistics and economic statistics are there by census definition, not because they are members of the Hawaiian race by any measure except by definition.
- Are Hawaiians as bad off as they are made out to be? No way. There are 200,000 or so living on the Mainland, and they are for the most part successful. Of the 260,000 or so living here, at least 75 percent are doing quite well by any standard. Some are more successful than others, and some less — just like the rest of us.
Why go any further with a bill as ambiguous and divisive as the Akaka bill? Our government should help everyone in need, not just a race-based, definition-created class of residents. We are all citizens of the United States, and we all deserve equal treatment under the law.
Thurston Twigg-Smith
Honolulu
Seen at http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050826/OPINION02/508260330/1104
You can read more about him and his racist ancestors here:
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/commemorative/history
Excerpt:
"In an effort to ensure the continuation of The Advertiser after his retirement, Twigg-Smith sold it in 1992 to Gannett Co., the largest newspaper chain in the United States, for $250 million."
It also shows a picture of his great grandfather, Lorrin A. Thurston who bought the paper in 1898. Hawaiians even wrote a chant about him comparing him to Satan and to a scorpion that attacks their own in vengeance. The chant is called "Pala Mai'a" or "Rotten Bananas:"
http://starbulletin.com/98/08/03/features/story2.html
More information about him is here: http://www.hawaiimatters.com/bio.html
He makes himself sound as though he was poor as a child. (He was not.) Eventually he attended Yale and earned a mechanical engineering degree in 1942. However he does not have a license to use the Akaka Bill to spread his hatred and his racism against the Hawaiian people.
