If This Is To Be The Pacific Century, We Must Listen To The People Of The Islands

Excerpt and Photo from civilbeat.org

Hawaii is hosting a wonderful event for the first time: the 10-day Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture. FestPAC is the largest gathering of Indigenous Pacific peoples and while this is ostensibly a cultural event, no doubt many conversations will be had about the uneasy future of our collective island homes.

When I think of this summer festival, I can’t help but compare it to the one in “Those That Walk Away From Omelas,” a famed short story written by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The story starts with an idyllic summer festival in a city called Omelas and builds out a tale of a place with unimaginable happiness. However, the underpinning of this happiness is an atrocity. To achieve the happiness of everyone else, a single child is locked up in squalor and subjected to intolerable filth, despondency and despair.

In Le Guin’s story, there are those that can’t accept the bargain. Those who leave to go to “a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”