If you’ve been following the news, particularly following President Elect Obama, then you’ll see he is already starting to make good on his campaign’s fundamental promise of change (or should I say Change.gov?). Obama and team are very quickly assembling their Cabinet and addressing the real and severe crises facing this great nation. Obviously the flailing economy is priority number one. And although I’m in no better financial position than I was weeks ago, I do feel somewhat better that Barack Obama is (just about to be) the man in charge.
Resident President Bush is off galafranting in Peru as he primes the pump for retirement by sipping “pisco sours”, and Obama is clearly applying his even-tempered, diplomatic, cool-under-pressure, ethical and hard-working approach to managing this country. So while hopefully many of us are concentrating on being responsible, diligent citizens, the Honolulu Advertiser today features a front-page article profiling two local Hawaii Obama websites.
One of sites was part of the Hawaii State Tourism website describing “Barack Obama’s Hawaii” and the other was called “Barack’s Neighborhood” created by Honolulu writer Rob Kay. Both of them are very well done – excellent reads filled with all the facts, history, anecdotes and inspiration I could ever want with Obama and Hawaii. They are indispensable resources for any web content consuming Obama follower.
As the creator of this site, someone who is also “a son of Hawaii,” with many parallels and similarities to Obama’s life here, energized as can be about him — you’d think I’d met my match. That there’s no way I can publish anything of original merit because it’s already being done on other Obama-Hawaii websites. But I have a hard time accepting and seeing Obama as centrally a local boy from Makiki. Therefore, turning this site into a mere repository of his past is something I’m not interested in.
Granted, though — it’s vital to understand Hawaii as a major force in shaping Obama’s world view, his temperament and his character. These other sites do a phenominal job of confirming this fact. But Hawaii alone is not the only Golden Ticket — it’s Obama’s innate ability to focus more on where he is going and less on where he is from. Some could argue “that’s the Chicago in him,” and I bet there’s some truth in that.
If you examine Obama’s upbringing in Hawaii, you’ll discover that he was not a typical local boy — he did not have generations of deep-rooted family established here. He did not have dozens of uncles or aunties or cousins: just his mom, sister, grandpa and tutu, and even that was splintered. Really, Obama being born and raised in Hawaii — from a kama‘aina (local’s) point of view –is by all means atypical. Yet it’s that very anomaly — his unpredictable, unlikely story — that helped catalyze his life into the greatness that it now is.
To clarify and conclude: I appreciate the helpful and interesting websites that chronicle Obama’s life in Hawaii. However, this site will not be one of them. I think it’s a slight diversion for people here in Hawaii to be overly nostalgic of Obama’s early life in Hawaii, because it tends to look backward instead of forward.
If we had to single out just one aspect of Obama and Hawaii, the one that is so strongly part of him and who he is, then it should be Aloha. And that is where this website begins.
Hawai‘i turns 50 today, which is a big–albeit subtle–deal in so many ways. If you’re from Hawaii or grew up here or lived here long enough to “get it”, there’s an undeniable significance about today.
