The Practicing Progressive

It was research has led me to the westernmost brewpub in America to compare Waimea Brewery’s Pale Ale to Sweet George’s Brown (a comparison that has Dillon Dam Brewery coming way out on top!) but it is philosophy that has me sitting on the lanai of this old Kauai plantation trying, once again, to unlock the mysteries of my life and times.

The last two winters have had me spending some time on this beautiful Hawaiian island that, paradoxically, is host to the rainiest mountain top on the planet as well as some of earth’s sunniest beaches.

Kauai’s semi-official motto provides fodder for my first philosophical foray: “One Island. Many Peoples. All Kauaians.” It is an inviting thought that provides some balance to the onslaught of tribalism that pervades so much of our world. Although my research is cursory at best, it does seem that this particular place in the middle of the Pacific has a high cultural tolerance level. In my own experience, only Nepal matches the kind of companionable welcome offered to the island’s visitors and residents alike. Pondering the religious, racial and political divides in much of the world only underscores the optimistic idealism that just may be taking hold here. Tempting as it is to avoid news from the rest of the world, a brief glance at favorite websites each morning only confirms one’s convictions that Kauai’s strategy may be the only viable one left.

America’s current foray into divisiveness that has puffed-up political commentator’s rooting for presidential failure and at-a-loss politicians pretending they know better has some of us yearning for the kind of unity modeled in this corner of the 50th state. Nursing a much too hop-infused beer, I stare out at the wind-whipped ocean and remember an afternoon in Greeley when Garrison Keillor brought his Prairie Home Companion to Colorado. With 10,000 or so folk seated in the arena waiting for this all-time favorite radio show to commence, Garrison stepped out into the crowd and began to lead us in a communal hymn or two. I doubt anyone present will ever forget how singing Colorado’s own “America the Beautiful” bound us all together, temporarily and tentatively to be sure, but bound nonetheless as caretakers of a national ideal that is tolerant of anything but intolerance. Farmers singing of spacious skies next to free-thinkers harmonizing on amber waves of grain created something sacred that had most of us, if just for a holy moment, yearning again for a more perfect union.

I suppose I could be accused of hiding from tough times in these now annual trips but, in fact, I’m finding travel to this romanticizing island a needed antidote for creeping cynicism. To discover that there still are places on this planet that strive for concord rather than conflict is to reaffirm conviction in the American ideal that all too easily and much too recently seems to get lost.

I came across a quote of historian Howard Zinn pinned to a public bulletin board in Kauai’s Old Koloa Town. Rain wrinkled, faded in parts and, I suspect, imperfectly transferred to this reporter’s notebook, it nevertheless illuminates something of what has me sitting here, beer in hand and mind in gear. Sometimes, most of the time if the truth be told, others can better express what we ourselves are yearning for: “…to be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now, as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory…”