Stop The Construction the TMT Telescope on Mauna Kea and the Arrest of Mauna Kea Protectors

[Hekate]

198. Most in this thread who say that are not listening to the answers. The US has nearly wiped out...

...the indigenous people of my home state. Of course it's been "accidental" -- just collateral damage from the March of Progress -- but an extinct culture is still extinct.

Except in this case it's not extinct. They have been slowly but steadily making a comeback. Sorry if that is giving the haoles some pilikia.

And by the gods, the Hawaiian people were not created for the amusement of tourists snapping photos of hula dancers and making faces at luau poi bowls.

I've been gone from the Islands a long time, but I am marked forever by having lived there through my formative years, elementary school through university, having my children there. That is the ground I stand upon.

That is the ground I stand upon, despite a love of scientific achievement, Enlightenment values, and all the rest. However, as far back as my graduate school experience in English Lit, I could see the drawbacks to taking those values to their logical extreme, in reading essays by Francis Bacon, who wrote that Science now had the capability to "put Nature on the rack" and "torture her secrets out of her." I don't need to look it up. The words are burned into my memory by how shocked I was when I read them.

You all want the massive lens of the telescope to look at the stars, but cannot turn the lens of compassion on him and the people of Hawai'i, to ask: "What do you want? Is there a genuine compromise here?" To do that would be to acknowledge their rights -- that they have rights.

Ellison believes passionately, but he is not speaking the same language as the rest of you. I hope I can translate somewhat, but judging from the lack of response, I am also failing to get through.