it waves to you a removed ground.

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26 april 1997

2:30 p.m.

Dear diary, I was the perfect picture of ridiculousness. Yesterday was not the day to wear a skirt. While maintenance workers struggled with the blizzard of leaves and trash, I was in a battle of my own. Walking around campus, I was grimacing and goose-stepping through puddles, hunching over to hold my skirt down and looking pretty much like I really had to pee. If that image wasn't pathetic enough, when it rained, I had to choreograph my strolls while trying to keep a sumo-sized umbrella over my head (leaving only one hand for flash-prevention). I only did a moderately good job in keeping dry, and got close to getting airborne several times. The weather in Hawai`i has a perverse sense of humor, but it's downright cruel in Manoa Valley. Four days in a row of stifling, suffocating moist heat. Four days of wishing I'd worn something other than jeans and long sleeves. Day five, I step out of the apartment congratulating myself for finally remembering to dress cool, and I'm soaked by the rain, whipped by the wind, and blown mere inches away from getting cited for indecent exposure. (And the way some people dress on this campus, that's saying a lot.) While the morning weatherbunny (I can't remember if it was KGMB or KHNL, but they're pretty much the same anyway) had chirped about the rain, she didn't say anything about the roaring gales. Well, she mentioned the wind, but when it's is strong enough to nudge my tank of a car off course, you know you're dealing with more than a "brisk tradewind." I got home to find assorted pieces of a neighbor's laundry on my balcony. So, it wasn't only a strong wind, but a eerily agile one. This stuff had to be ripped off one of the dozens of makeshift balcony clotheslines in this building, blown out over the street, then thrown back and onto my railing. I'm still not sure how to find their proper owner. I don't feel up to posting a sign on the gate that reads: "Found, one flower-patterned pillowcase and other... whites." I was speechless when I heard about the desecration of Punchbowl -- the National Cemetery of the Pacific -- and a number of other Honolulu graveyards and veterans' memorials. Seeing the pictures in the morning paper literally knocked the breath out of me. Somber, marble monuments to Hawaii's countless veterans, and dozens of family graves housing generations of ancestors, were spray painted with angry, petty messages attacking the police, native Hawaiians, and essentially any other group already all-too-familiar with hatred. One of my coworkers, a serious historian as far as the famed 442nd and World War II is concerned, started crying the instant she saw them. She read the article, stunned, choking at the mention of every defilement. My first reaction wasn't anger. Not necessarily disgust, either. So many feelings are stirred by the whole thing, I still haven't been able to sort out every thought. But I do know that, in a strange way, I was afraid. Afraid for for the people who did it. To say there are a good million or so people who'd like to have a few words with the culprits would be a severe understatement. And with Punchbowl -- a federal, veterans' cemetery -- there's a mob of lawyers, prosecutors and judges champing at the bit to bring them to justice. Hard, swift justice. But my fear -- and my horror -- swelled from deeper within. From a part of my conscience I've given up trying to define, but whose presence I've learned to cherish. I'm not religious, and frankly I know I've offended most religious people I know at least once. Probably twice. But I am very deeply spiritual, and wholly respectful of anything beyond the grasp of mortals. I brag that I have no shame, and few hang-ups. Flaming liberal, blind radical, obnoxious bitch -- call me anything but reserved. But there are, in fact, some things I don't ever fuck with. I don't have much of a sixth sense. Yet even I can feel that these monkeys have way, way more to worry about than shower time in the cellblock. Yes, they have much to fear from their fellow men; from the law. But the fiery vengeance of the living is nothing compared to the atonement that will be exacted by the dead. The travesty has had some tragic -- though expected -- side effects, however. The esteemed journalists at KGMB -- home of "Alternative Universe News" (when everyone's top story is a brush fire, they open with research on gerbil reproduction in France -- are the first locally to pull the "blame it on the internet" slant. I hate that. Pointless and insulting scapegoating. Or rather, netscapegoating. (Hey... I like that.) After Oklahoma City, hundreds of stories screamed, "You can look up how to make bombs on the internet!" After the whole Halle-Bopp Death Pudding fiasco, the press -- too lazy (or chicken) to actually go out and interview real cults -- quoted at length from the homepages of assorted McCults on the web. I'm betting they'll discover the graveyards were vandalized by a stupid youth gang. But, thanks to the Stone Phillipses and Ann Landerses of the world, there will be people who will nonetheless be further convinced that every ill of society is the fault of the internet -- or any technology they can't understand.