No Coast Guard boat on Kona side?
No Coast Guard boat on Kona side?
The recent rescue off our Kona Coast of three local fishermen and their fishing boat makes me appreciate once again the hard work and dedication of our first responders. The Hawaii County Fire rescue team once again showed their worth — and reiterated the importance of having rescue teams appropriately placed — throughout our island.
However, I just recently learned that our Kona side of the Big Island does not have an official Coast Guard rescue boat at the ready in our West Hawaii waters. Why is that?
I’m sure there is a long, sordid history to this inequity. Perhaps our West Hawaii legislative delegation can shed some light on this situation? Wouldn’t it seem logical, in light of our many boat-related businesses (tourism, fishing charters, etc.) to have a Coast Guard station here on the Kona side?
Imagine, instead of coming from Hilo or Oahu, our own Coast Guard boat, stationed here in Kona. Or perhaps the current arrangement is sufficient?
Toni Reynolds
Kona
Differences stark between ideology
In Thursday’s paper, Mr. Gregory attempts to justify keeping confederate statuary, by mentioning the slave owner status of the founding fathers.
Although that is accurate, it minimizes the fact that the confederacy was established on the idea that the races were not equal, and essentially that slavery is justified, this idea was important enough to make it into the confederacy’s Vice President’s Cornerstone Speech. The founding fathers do not list ensuring the keeping of slaves, or the rightness of it, as a reason for the split from Britain.
Reminders of the confederacy, and glorification of the leaders of, will always have the stain of that abhorrent ideology, and justly so, as they are inseparable from it.
Matt and Tracy Hancuh
Kailua-Kona
Descendants should be asked whom should be revered
One of the reasons that issues seem so difficult to discuss these days may lie in the way they are presented. A case in point may be the argument on the WHT editorial page of Thursday, Sept. 21 that the issue of tearing statues down rests on the fact that the historical figures represented by those statues were slave owners. With the argument thus defined, it can then be stated that the statues of previous (slave holding) presidents’ should also, logically, be torn down, and that the American Revolution differed very little from the Civil War.
Left out of the discussion would be the American descendants of those slaves, and some recognition as to their feelings in regards to those figures being revered as a part of our history and deserving of a statue. Or the issue that those citizens maintained the right not only to buy, sell and use other human beings but to defend this right by force against their government in light of the Declaration of Independence.
I’m not suggesting that the author was purposefully crafting his argument for those reasons or that he does not hold every citizen and principle of this country in the highest regard. It is just that these last few decades we seem increasingly unable to discuss vital questions in our society as fellow participants. The urge to choose sides and see the others as “the real problem” has been modeled for far too long.
Terry McVay
Captain Cook