The one thing, about living in Hawaii, that my thoughts are evolving around is the fact that this is a place that changes you, and you really don’t have any power or ability to change it. A lot of folks from the mainland, some of them successful businesspeople, tell me their “select adjectives” of what they think of the government, education, etc. I tell them that Hawaii has never been built sociologically on the premise of someone coming in from the outside and changing things here. Its always been on the inside, and its something that has taken a great deal of time, in some cases to effectuate. Want to be one of those inside people – you said it best, its linking up, evolving to the thinking of how this place is and not trying to think that you can come in and be a bull in a China shop.

One last thought about all this – another reason why people came to Hawaii, at least in the past, was that this was a place that was much more tolerant of people than anything on the mainland. My parents came here, separately and met here, precisely because of that tolerance. Only when age forced him did my father leave, my mother despite how she saw the government and education here, never left because there is really no other place in this world that is easy to get to that has what we have here….the ability to give people who come from other places the benefit of the doubt. Try to find that in the middle of Iowa, or even in bigger cities on the mainland.

Nice piece Peter. I will share this with my friends as the time comes to describe what its really like here in Hawaii.