Aloha mai kākou,
I suppose a person who always looks for the middle often finds themselves there, witnessing dissonance or difference or non-agreement, finding the space between. I’m one of those people, and I that’s often a safe spot for me.
This weekend I find myself in Santa Barbara helping to plan a health equity summit. On the first night, a few of us met in the lobby bar for dinner. As we talked, intermittent streams of young folks passed by, dressed up in suits or cowboy hats or t-shirts, all wearing badges and talking excitedly.
“Yeah, it makes sense to me. I know we help other countries, but what do WE get out of it? We have to pull back.” These young folks had just come out of a session all fired up, where speakers had inspired them with tools and knowledge and facts.
We realized we had landed smack dab in the middle of a young Republican’s “Freedom Conference”, where college students were specially recruited to come learn how to be conservative warriors on their campuses, to fight for freedom, for free speech, for what is right.
Meanwhile, at our dinner table we sat discussing community raids and SNAP cuts and loss of services that deeply affect so many people across the nation. Health equity. One of our summit co-chairs teaches college in Texas. She also teaches in the community, and her classroom is literal feet from the border wall. As she teaches, National Guard officers patrol outside the window, and the layers of barbed wire just keep getting higher and higher.
As the young students streamed past our dinner table, I felt Aunty Pua sitting right next to me. And I thought about what she would do. I imagined her, as I’ve seen her do so many times, asking a young stranger in her curious way about themselves. Their name. Their story. Their dreams. I’ve seen her light people up, even in passing.
Everyone needs this. As I watched the student go by, they had it. They were lit up with purpose and motivation. What is remarkable to me is that these young people were being offered something so potent, something that seems to be missing for a lot of folks in our world—this gathering offered a sense of belonging and validation, and an identity as an underdog. According to their website (which doesn’t have any info about the conference now that it’s pau or any other past events), the conference organization identifies young, conservative thinkers as victims on college campuses who are being persecuted for being free thinkers. It provides them tools and support to organize and act. It encourages them to set up their own chapters of young Republicans at their universities. To be a freedom fighter.
What is freedom? I wonder. And how to make it so tantalizing or so true feeling, the quest of it, that a particular agenda becomes appealing? It’s ironic to me to seek freedom without equity. Aunty Pua always says that the deepest layer of pono is hope, and you can’t have hope, or pono, without equity. But some of the policies and ideas that are espoused in the name of “freedom” are not for everyone—at least, you can fight for them, but they might not fight for you. Am I wrong?
I realized I am quite judge-y. This idea, a dream of a place called “America” has become mythical. Behind the curtain, there’s not much there that is just, or interdependent, or inclusive, or really any of the values that I aspire to. There’s absolutely no sense of kākou. There’s only “us” against “them”. I’ve felt this since I was a kid who moved from Hawai‘i to the continent for high school, and that dissonance exploded when I lived in Nicaragua and reflected on the idea of “América.” It deepened again when I moved home and learned the history of Hawai‘I beyond what I was taught at Aikahi Elementary or Kailua Intermediate School. It put my family history into stark and transformative context.
Who is the “underdog” in this North American scenario? Surely not the thousands of folks being rounded up and disappeared, or folks like my parents who might be about to lose their health insurance. It’s these college students who are the underdogs. That narrative and identity is hard for me to recognize and make space for, even though I try to believe that “all feelings are okay.”
I realized that with all these folks around attending that conference, I didn’t feel safe. And it’s been a while since I felt that. And I’m sure that I probably was safe in this nice hotel in this wet, bougie beach town, but the feeling of being so surrounded by that kind of ideology is something I haven’t felt in a very long time. (And this is partly why I live in Hawai‘i.)
I was in Seattle this weekend for just a day, passing through. My friends there are mostly from Mexico, and their friends too. They walked and drove the streets freely, they weren’t worried about their status. I met this earnest young man, friend of a friend; we talked story and he told me about his family and his dreams. We shared our friend’s ‘ono posole and talked about his hometown. He showed me a sweet picture of his parents. Then he gave us a ride to Capitol Hill. Ho couldn’t cruise with us because he’s not even 21 yet. He doesn’t have a legal ID.
On Capitol Hill there were vendors all over with pop-up tents on street corners selling tacos, elotes, and more. I was surprised. The Seattle I experienced seems like a strange unicorn against the backdrop of a nation where folks are being disappeared all over, where people are afraid to go outside. My friend Omar said: “They could never in Seattle. When ICE tries to take someone, everyone just comes and attacks them, and shames them.”
That doesn’t mean folks aren’t being taken in the Northwest. But it just makes me think how flimsy and opportunistic the veneer of state violence is, how brittle these systems of terror that come and steal our good neighbors and kind folks who contribute to our societies, who feed us with their labor and their aloha. How flimsy, how brittle, and how dangerous.
What will it take to undo all this violence? How will we return a sense of safety and belonging to our people, so the world can be a place for kākou, where this doesn’t happen while we all watch? Where people don’t feel attacked, and don’t need to take away or cut down the services, systems, and resources that keep us healthy or simply alive in order to project their own idea of safety? And where belonging isn’t just for some of us, but everyone.
Remember when we were kids (depending on your age) and you could take 25 cents to those little machines at the front of a store and get a little toy in a plastic egg? One toy I remember was a little rubbery half moon that you could turn inside out. It would suction to your hand, your arm, or the table, and then slowly pop off. I feel like we are in the pressure of that bubble, and soon we will huli maka flip; we will pop off.
How that’s going to come to pass, I’m not sure. Hopefully the hulihia is a transition into something better. But we have to come to the middle around not just our values, but actions that are important and vital to our survival and our wellbeing, regardless of the outcome. Goodness knows that’s what others are doing, and doing well, and preparing to act.
What are the values and actions that are vital for you now? How can we organize ourselves together around kākou instead of us vs. each other?
Mahalo,
Dawn
Photo taken 11/16/25 in Santa Barbara. Local version of ‘akulikuli?