No Columbus Day letter offensive to Italians
Racist? Who’s being racist here? Or are you just totally ignorant? If you want your racist day, go ahead, just choose another day!
You have offended half my ancestry, many of my friends and relatives needlessly. Again, choose another day!
Columbus was not an imperialist. He was a very brave sea captain. He never set foot on mainland USA nor the Hawaiian Islands.
Remember Italians have given us so much: opera, the radio, developed the piano and violin and much more. Art, music, sculpture, inventors, philosophers, the list goes on and on.
Leonard da Vinci, Dante Alighieri, Giuseppe Verdi, Vincenzo Bellini, Luigi Galvani, Francesco Petrarca, Galileo Galilei, Giovanni Boccaccio, Amerigo Vespucci, Giotto di Bondone, Alessandro Volta, Guglielmo Marconi, Niccolo Paganini, Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), Giuseppe de Lampedusa, Umberto Eco …
Or maybe you just remember Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra? That’s a start!
So, once you are bilingual, how about trying trilingual? Maybe a language spoken in several other countries around the world, such as Italian, Spanish, or French.
Oh, by the way, are you giving up pizza, pasta, ravioli, lasagna, spaghetti, focaccia, prosciutto, chianti?
Margaret Casari Marceron
Kailua-Kona
Saddle Road project deserves high praise
The Hawaii Department of Transportation and the Central Federal Lands Highway Division recently dedicated the east side Saddle Road phase. This new highway is a huge improvement over the old roadway that meandered through upper Kaumana. The latter had a lot of safety deficiencies and didn’t meet modern highway standards. The new highway between mile marker 5.67 and mile marker 11.71 meets all modern highway standards, and completes a critical thoroughfare linking West and East Hawaii.
The Hawaii Department of Transportation, Central Federal Lands Highway Division, and its contractor, Road and Highway Builders LLC, have a lot of to be proud of. They were able to deliver a modern highway on time, under budget, and were able to fulfill late Sen. Dan Inouye’s vision. In addition, the CFLHD did a great job informing the public of project updates on a monthly basis during the construction phase.
The CFLHD project engineer, who oversaw this final phase, was always available if I had any specific project-related questions. Other ongoing highway projects on this island should take a cue from the CFLHD’s efforts to keep the public informed about this particular project.
The core Saddle Road improvement project is now finished with the completion of this final phase. However, I hope the HDOT and CFLHD proceed with the Saddle Road extension, which will extend Saddle Road to Queen Kaahumanu Highway in West Hawaii.
It took roughly 13 years, and over $300 million, to reconstruct and realign about 45 miles of Saddle Road but it was totally worth all the effort and time. This improved highway will be paying dividends for this island for years to come.
Aaron Stene
Kailua-Kona
