When Alternate History Hits Close to Home Options

[Kazuhiro]

I'm just gonna come out and admit it; I'm racist against Native Hawaiians. Their census numbers tell an "oppressed minority" story; proportionally low income and education, which is a fancy way to say that a lot of them are poor. This rather prevents the decent folk from sympathizing with them when they put on T-shirts that say "Malama 'aina" (love for the land) and restrict development in the name of some horribly misguided pseudo-environmentalist ethic, or when they wear "Ku I Ka Pono, Justice for Hawaiians" shirts while riding the bus with the 14 kids they had because of the welfare benefits, and my personal favorite, the ones who hold demonstrations without permission from the police department and put up huge "KAU INOA" banners saying that white people are responsible for Hawaii's problems and that the American government are a bunch of modern-day imperialists.

Basically here we have a demographic who likes to blame their problems on the crimes of white men who have been dead for a hundred years. Or at least, they transfer these crimes onto people who could not possibly be to blame, such as my girlfriend, who spent her public school years being bullied because she was white.

Funnily enough, asians avoid being considered aliens to Hawaii to at least some extent, so it really is just racism against "haoles."

So, although it was fascinating to read an alternate timeline in which the ignorant masses get their way, I can't pretend it didn't get me at least a little upset. The book says the reason they never got secession is because native hawaiians are such a small minority, but the real reason is because Hawaiian secessionists are a fringe group and have nowhere near the money, education, or all-around intelligence it would take to get something like that done.

Yes, I did just read through the "Paradise Lost" booklet which is a Shadowrun campaign set in Hawaii 2054, how did you guess?

On reading back through what I wrote there, I feel it important to pull the "have many [group] friends" card and add the disclaimer that none of this distaste for Hawaiian protest groups affects judgements on a personal level, or so I'd like to think.