So as you may know this last week I was on the mainland travelling around. The places I went to was Orange County, California, San Antonio and Corpus Christi, Texas. Throughout my trip I turned my mouth off and tuned my ears into listening for what the people on the mainland were talking about.
As a pol, one thing is that you listen to see if the amount of noise coming from events (Mauna Kea on Hawaii and impeachment in Washington DC) are issues that are on the lips of rank and file people that you meet every day in the neighborhood.
Now before I start into what I heard, keep in mind I went to places that I felt were symbols of what the regular joe does. The Greyhound Bus Station in
San Antonio, the airport in Santa Ana in California as well as a national conference I attended in Corpus Chirsti.
Again, tuned in my ears to see if people were talking about these issues that we deal with, here, on an almost daily, if not more frequent basis.
And the answer I got back after arriving home in Honolulu: nope, no one’s paying attention.
Now let us put Mauna Kea off to the side. Yeah, that is going to be a local issue. Let’s just focus now on impeachment. As you know the House of Representatives in Washington has started an “impeachment investigation” over a whistleblower complaint of content spoken in a conversation between President Trump and the president of Ukraine.
To me it’s a pretty straight forward issue – did Pres. Trump say what he said to force Ukraine to start an investigation into the dealings of his political rival, Joe Biden and his family? The evidence is being parceled out right now at many different levels. However, one level of which it is not being played out is with the people of America largely.
This issue of impeachment is almost to the point right now where people do not know and don’t care. That is a true sign, in my opinion, that the actions in Washington are not resonating too much with the people of America. It is also a sign of the state of our current media. They are all over this impeachment thing like butter on bread. In fact that is the only thing that talked about impeachment when I was on this trip.
Going back to Mauna Kea and that issue, you’d think by now it would be at the level of what happened at Standing Rock and the protests over the oil pipeline. Nevertheless, as I see it, the only people talking about Mauna Kea are the local pundits, the local news and maybe once in a while a local politician. Of course those who are in the business of talking about this in discussion circles, with people who pay attention to this, are the only ones talking.
And believe me, outside of the confines of this state, ain’t no one talking about Mauna Kea anywhere either.