1 - Honolulu is NOT a small town. It’s the seventh fucking largest fucking city in the fucking country. It’s pretty fucking big. In fact, fucking fact, it’s the fucking biggest fucking city I’ve ever fucking lived in. Or fucked in.

2 - I grew up in a small town. A very small town. Ask The Bear. She’s seen it. One blinking red light. My dad took her on a tour of the town when she came to visit and introduced her to both of the other business people there, and the judge, and the chief of police. It was, literally, a walk around the block. I went to school with kids who lived on little dairy farms and wouldn’t drink the milk at school because “pastuerized milk tastes funny.” This is not a small town.

3 - You are right about most of your post. I fucking hate a lot of Punahou people. However, and this is key, they’re not “kids.” These people are, mostly, officers of the freakin’ Hawaii court. They have law degrees. They are or are nearly 30 years old. Punahou KIDS actually IN Punahou, I got no problem with. Punahou ALUMNI are the people I hate.

4 - As my friend Damon “Silver Spoon” Schmidt pointed out to me once, my exposure to Punahou grads were, for the most part, those people that regardless of their potential (Berkeley grads who got 178s on their LSATs), came back to Hawaii for some reason rather than going forward from where they were. They were “caught in the tractor beam.” So, I suppose, I may have meet a disproportionate number of Punahou alumni who say things like the following:

a) “Oh my god. I’m never going back to the mainland, after college! It’s so dirty and disgusting and everybody’s so horrible and mean!”
“Really? Where did you go to college?”
“UC Santa Barbara.”

and my favorite:

b) “It wasn’t until I saw a statue of him at University of Virgina that I realized General Robert E. Lee wasn’t Korean.”

5 - You seem to forget I just spent several months at the Honolulu Police Academy. I get the “I’m haole with a law degree, get used to seeing Punahou people” thing. Frankly, that’s likely a major contributing factor as to why I’m no longer with HPD. However, I got along a lot better with the Samoan guys from Waianae a lot better than I did with most of my classmates in law school. Also, my ex-girlfriend owned a house in Papakolea. I went trick-or-treating with her nephews up there. Try to fit THAT puzzle piece into your mental jigsaw image of me. Mainly, it just makes me sad that the Honolulu Caste System dictates that because of my education and European ancestry, I’m relegated to dealing with pompus snobby Punahou alumni.

6 - When I say I hate the institution, I mean I hate the greater cultural acceptance of the superiority of private schooling. I clearly don’t hate the physical grounds. I went to a school that didn’t have enough text books in science class to let us take them home. We had to do our homework at the school. I still got to law school. I agree, the public schools in Hawaii suck. But they suck mostly everywhere. It frightens me to think that I may, some day soon, become one of those people that loses sleep because my child isn’t showing enough motor skill when playing with his or her toys to get into the right PRE-SCHOOL so that he or she can get into PUNAHOU.

7 - I’ve lived here for four years now. And your response that “I’m just not used to being a minority blah blah blah” is getting stale. This isn’t about race. Being white just means people think I only eat potatoes and can’t use chopsticks. They do, typically, assume I’m well educated and privledged. I can’t blame them for the second half of that stereotype. It’s true.

I’ve lived here long enough that I feel that this is my home. And if I don’t like something about my home and how it’s run, I am free to say whatever the fuck I want about it. The problem was for the first two years I lived here I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say anything, or question it, because like the good anthropologist I was trained to be, I thought “this is a different culture, and you can’t judge it.” The difference is that now it’s not a temporary experience of cross-cultural learning, it’s my home. And I get to judge my home. And I don’t like Punahou. I suppose, more accurately, I don’t like what Punahou REPRESENTS.

8 - And we’re back to the part of the Hawaii experience that you are capable of understanding, but won’t, because you haven’t experienced it. Everything about who you are in Hawaii is based on who you know. Your high school, your family, your ethnicity. These are all things I have. These are things that have meaning to me. They don’t have any meaning to anybody in Hawaii though, so, as a “mainland haole” I am not given social permission to judge anything in Hawaii. When I do, I’m told “you can’t understand because you’re not from here.” Well, that’s bullshit. I understand just fine. And it’s not like anybody’s ever going to give me a little initiation ceremony and hand me my Official Local Badge. Well, I suppose if I’d made it through the police academy, that’s exactly what they would have done. But the point is that I’ve chosen to make that decision for myself. I don’t have to act, or think, or fall into the caste system in Hawaii to be allowed to have opinions. And if that pisses people off, well, they can suck my big, hairy Sicilian balls.

I have memories as a youth of getting excited to shop at Costco since it involved a drive into town, visiting the new starbucks, watching people line up outside of the new Walmart excited to get inside and shop. I’ve never heard any place else in the United States we’re people act the same way.

With time, people will consider you a local. One thing most people don’t get is that food is an enourmous part of Hawaii culture. If you eat everything that is offered to you, instantly people accept you. Food the opium of the masses. Embrace it.