I want to believe that I live in a democracy in which the majority rules. However, here in Hawaii, we are too often subjected to the tyranny of the vocal minority. This minority managed to jettison a proposal to launch
I want to believe that I live in a democracy in which the majority rules. However, here in Hawaii, we are too often subjected to the tyranny of the vocal minority. This minority managed to jettison a proposal to launch weather satellites from South Point, a proposal to irradiate tropical fruit for exportation, a proposal to connect the islands with a passenger-and-freight ferry system, and now they are taking aim at the plan to erect a 30-meter telescope atop Mauna Kea.
The quiet majority who favor the Thirty Meter Telescope are not going to build a hale near the summit and leave a mess for others to clean up. They are not going to use school time to take their students to the summit to protest or ask them to protest on Saturdays along the streets in Waimea. That is not their way. Theirs is to go through every legal hoop placed in their path, to treat the opposition with respect, and to trust the legal system to interpret the laws and the government to follow through on its promises. They have been patient.
Yet the emotional rhetoric and the last-ditch, quasi-legal and illegal activities of the vocal minority have grabbed the attention of the media and brought into question the integrity of the government, which has appeased the protesters with a “time out” from construction. Just for once I would like to see rational thought, empirical evidence, and a vision of the future trump superstition, mythology and revisionist history.
Their argument that the telescopes are ruining the natural environment is weak. The current telescopes leave no waste behind. They probably have less long-term impact on the aina than a community that uses cesspools and tosses their trash, including toxic waste, into their yards or along the roadside.
I am not a scientist. In fact, I enjoyed a long career as a public high school English teacher. I have read many more myth books than science books. I find human truths in myths — truths about the ways various cultures explained where we came from and where we will go after death and why natural phenomena and people behave as they do. For those of us who embrace science, those questions have been answered in ways that make sense to us — and the answers to those questions are truly miraculous — much more so than any of the miracles than we find recounted in mythologies all over the world.
Basing one’s beliefs on oral traditions made sense when we had no written word and a limited understanding of the physical world. However, anyone who has told a story and then heard it retold by someone who heard it from someone else knows that the narrative is altered in each retelling. Nothing is sacred in itself — it is human belief that makes it so, sometimes (as in the case of Mauna Kea) after the fact. I strongly suspect the Marquesans and Tahitians who first migrated to the Hawaiian Islands would embrace the TMT being built on the tallest peak in the Pacific. They would understand the spiritual connection between using the stars to navigate the ocean and the universe. They would see the mountain as the connection between ocean and outerspace.
Nothing could be more soul-enriching, more spiritual than allowing a large eye in the sky to help us understand the universe — its beginning, its nature, its scope, its history and its future. People have long appreciated the beauty of the night sky, marveled at stars, meteorites, comets and planets. They composed songs and chants and stories and thus created myths about what they saw. In the past few decades, largely because of the Keck telescopes, we have taken huge leaps in our understanding of the universe. We have a whole new vocabulary to describe the wonders that are out there and to ignite the imaginations of our children and grandchildren.
The protesters seem to think that placing a telescope that can peer into the edges of the universe on “their” mountain is a sacrilege. Not true. Closing one’s mind to the possibilities of such a beautiful endeavor — one shared by several nations — is the real desecration. Spirituality has nothing to do with pitting us against them. It has nothing to do with proscribed beliefs and everything to do with opening the mind to love all that is beautiful (topography, mathematics, art, music, science, poetry, human life) and embracing intellectual and esthetic growth. Let’s move Hawaii into the 21st century of human thought and discovery and not allow ourselves to be overpowered once again by a well-meaning but irrational minority who cannot distinguish between myth and truth.
Kerrill J. Kephart is a resident of Waimea.
Viewpoint articles are the opinion of the writer and not necessarily the opinion of West Hawaii Today.
