It’s been more than a year since Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba left Hawai‘i for the chillier but, for him anyway, more congenial climes of the US Pacific Northwest. However, as Quilly laments (’cause she doesn’t get to go … not YFNA’s fault), he still has a pseudopod or two stuck into Hawai‘i business, and still gets email from his former employer.
Including a barrage from yesterday that amounted to a kokua alert calling on people to descend on the Hawai‘i legislature and rail against a bill now before it. A bill (SB120) that calls on terminating practically all of the set-aside funds on the state’s books – for everything from shelters for battered women to the athletic programs of the University of Hawai‘i – and roll them into the state’s general fund.
Where the funding just might disappear. At least, that’s what the beneficiaries of each of the special allocations fears. So they’re to do all the yelling they can to tell their elected (NB) officials that their particular pot is crucial to the future of Hawai‘i.
Which of course it is. To the bureaucrats and functionaries who manage each of these little pots.
The first time this happened (at least while I was watching), I wrote:
… if everybody screams so loud that the Legislature sees only death by cutting anything … well, it’s like how Bill Cosby imagined God, faced with all the gamblers in Vegas calling on the Deity for this roll, and that number, and the other favor, and responding in the only fair and appropriate manner:
BUST EVERYBODY!!
Which appears, to YFNA, to be exactly what SB120 is proposing. Can it be …. nah.
Far as I know, the State of Hawai‘i is just as bankrupt now as it was in 2009, and just as trussed up in its history and its bureaucracies and its special interests (are we sure that ‘ohana isn’t a Sicilian loanword?). SB120 looks to YFNA like an attempt to trim the Hawai‘i state budget with thermonuclear weapons. But there’s a certain logic, Alexander, in wiping the slate clean and making every one of these pressure groups prove, de novo, that, unlike UH football gridiron, it is indeed crucial to the present and future state of the State.
The kokua alert called on me to contact the State Legislature and submit my testimony.
Which I did.
But my testimony was perhaps not precisely what they were hoping to get.
– O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2011 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.
O'Ceallaigh & The Quill 
That’s why when I go to Sacramento, nobody encourages me to testify anymore.
Your vision’s too good to see the Emperor’s duds, Dawg?