The truth is, I didn’t know a damned thing about Hawaii’s history other than the fact that it was “discovered” by Captain Cook, and it was made a state in the same year my wife was born.
I was, in some ways, happier not knowing anything more than that—since to know more than that is to have to once again face the realization that the United States of America is not Reagan’s “shining city on a hill”, so much as (pardon the mixing of metaphors) a fucking lighthouse warning people away from the headlands of that famous road to Hell. You know, the one paved in good intentions?
80 years, roughly—that’s how long it took for Protestant missionaries and their avaricious children to steal a country away from its people, all the while telling everyone that they were doing it for their own good.
And make no mistake: it was stolen. At the time of the first Treaty of Annexation, the majority of citizens were documented as rejecting it. God love ’em, the Democrats at the time defeated it…though only because they were bigots worried about the possibility of enfranchising inferior races. Sometimes if feels like we are conceptually incapable of doing the right thing for the right reasons.
So it became a territory under the table, in a joint resolution that should never have been binding—Hell, I’m almost surprised the Republican party didn’t take up the cause of reversing Hawaii’s statehood as illegal and a grave injustice done to a soveriegn people, as a real way to claim President Obama wasn’t a citizen.
Of course, that was only the final act in a multi-decade con in which supposedly God-fearing New Englanders systematically manipulated the rulers of a relatively isolated and unworldly kingdom for their own venal ends; although from this modern perspective—and, admittedly, with the aid of someone building a narrative on it—you can see them telegraph every move, I have to imagine that it unfolded in real time much more bewilderingly for the ruling family.
I thought the reward for a good life for Christians was supposed to be the Kingdom of Heaven, not the Kingdom of Hawaii. Feh.
