Hawaii in 100 Years: Robots and Wealthy Outsiders
One Hundred years from now, Hawaii will be a three-tiered society, wholly owned and occupied by foreign interests.
At the top will be the super-rich Japanese and Hong Kong/Taiwan Chinese nationals who own the land and property of Hawaii and use the state as their playground, enjoying themselves at the huge gambling casinos they will have constructed, and avoiding the surf and sun because of cancer-causing rays streaming from the ozone-depleted skies.
The comparatively fewer haoles present will be rich Europeans, rocketing around the world in a few hours on the "Orient Express." They will be citizens of the United States of Europe that will emerge shortly after the establishment of the Single European Market in 1992 and the integration of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union into a revitalized European culture and economy.
It will take the U.S. more than 50 years to recover from the deep recession into which it will sink when President Bush tries to deal with the economic disasters caused by Reaganomics. Reagan's policies have stolen so deeply from the future, and so neglected basic needs in the present, that the average American citizen is in danger of being little more than a Third World peasant for most of the 21st century.
So Japanese, overseas Chinese, and Europeans are the only people who will be able to afford to buy up and live in Hawaii. And they will in great numbers. White Americans stay home.
The second tier of residents in Hawaii will be marginalized locals. Like the American Indians before them, they will be moved from welfare settlement to welfare settlement as the land that they occupy becomes valuable for foreign real estate development. Eventually a "final solution" will be sought and found: Those locals who are too poor, or too poorly prepared to find at least meager jobs on the Mainland or elsewhere in the world, will be herded into mobile welfare camps -- trailers and barges full of welfare families which move along the back alleys, canals and polluted reefs in an endlessly futile search for aloha.
Neither rich nor poor will work. work will be performed by members of the third tier. These are highly sophisticated and artificially intelligent robots made in wholly automated factories of the Soviet Far East, factories developed by Japanese following the "normalization" of the Soviet Union. In an irony wholly lost on the future, the hardest working and most reliable robots will be those created in Siberia.
This is the way the future of Hawaii seems to me, I very much regret to say.
The only viable alternatives to this future that I see are in the various Hawaiian Nation movements and in the Green Party of Hawaii. But frankly, I don't believe any of these will gain much attention or support here until it is too late. Indeed, it may already be too late; it may be 200 years too late.
Do you think I am being too pessimistic? Think honestly (or learn some honest things) about the past 200 years, and then contemplate the next 100. Tell me why it should be any different in the future than it has been in the past. You make a lot of decisions affecting the future around here.
If it isn't what you want, then why not try to do something about it.