When I think I might never see Hawaii again

        There are a lot of ways things can go where I would never get back. It is not that important, not most important anyway, that I do get back to what I consider home, to be there one more time or one last time. I was there and it is in my heart, a glimmer only sometimes facing these dark days ahead, but as yet unvanquished. I have my Hawaiian music, my memories, and still yet, my hopes for the future, where that is but a mere part of them. Selfish maybe, yet not at all because it fuels all the good things I do, much of what I have done, and much that I might still yet do in time.
        What comforts me is that one of my heroes, one of America's greatest leaders, wanted only to see his home state one last time before he died, but was forbidden to. It is not to take comfort that someone else had a worse pain, suffered more, for if I return, I still will feel sadness that he did could not. But I have found what he felt, a connection to a place, a sense of homeland, a connection to a spot on the Earth at a given place in time to wish to reunite with, and a longing or saddness if that cannot be. His place of choice, his place of home where he longed to go but could not return was the Wallowa Valley in Oregon, and hopefully those who go there can appreciate it for him, and remember what little he asked for, and how great a price was taken. If you cannot tell what great American leader called that place home, then I will be glad to be the first to remind or inform you of him, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, otherwise known to most as Chief Joseph the Elder of the Nez Percé.
        Some may think me unworthy to speak of him, others would condemn me for calling him a great American leader, yet if he was not an American, who can say they are? If American's are not a race, as we like to point out, but many races, then why cannot an American be one outside of a government? Governments come and hopefully will go and give way to better and more just ones, but people and places remain. There was no doubt he was a good leader and an American, therefore it is not wrong to say he was an American leader to which any could be proud of.
        I have mentioned him before in my writings, and mentioning him now is because so many have not heard his most famous words, now dead in the hearts of Americans, many but not all, and need rekindling now more than ever. All that was great about America, the government at least, that small portion of what is America, has gone terribly wrong. Former President James Carter's belief in a self-correcting mechansim is unfortunately seemingly misplaced at the moment. We have been fed illusions of our worth, blinded to the suffering we are inflicting all over the world in the name of values it is apparent to all all over the world we are not living by and seemingly no longer believe in except to use as an excuse to take what we wish and do whatever is our will.
        Nothing can I remember having moved me more deeply than when I read the words below. It is not just words, not just pain or agony at the reality of war we have been sanitized from, protected from, and because of which, that distancing, we watch men and women without hearts advocating things on television to us and to children, what they are teaching to a new generation, advocating avoidable attacks that would cost thousands of innocent lives, without guilt over what they say, without hesitation in what they are advocating, and without regrets. Joseph's pain innoculated me against thinking like that, and his words will outlive the hate mongers, the torture advocators, and those who scorn diplomacy and the avoidance of war as "weak".
        These words, his words, will outilve those people because the world they advocate cannot endure, would not survive. A world which not only remember's these words but learns from them, takes them into its heart as I have into mine, that is a world which can endure. That is the future I work for, hope for, would live and die for, but the future we are creating now, what our present leaders wish to give the world, that is nothing I would want to be a part of. That world in which we have already recently killed tens of thousands of innocents in cold blood unnecessarily, and would kill millions if not billions to prevent the world from growing beyond the systems we have now, based on the need for war, the rewarding of aggression, and the sanctity of mass murders beyond scale in the name of country and in the name of God. May their notions not be passed on. Humanity could not long survive it if they do. The goal and the means to takes us to that better world are found in the words below for any to hear, to know, and to feel, and to guide us back from the brink by remembering the slaughters we have done in the past, and are about to repeat again.

"It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are -- perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever"