(NOTE: The post is writer's notebook stuff. In some refined and reorganized form, I expect it to be somewhere in Global Neighborhoods. There will be a great many more pieces like this on this blog over the next few months. Your comments on these pieces are important. Like Naked Conversations, my way of writing is to collaborate with the blogosphere. The blogosphere helped us write a much better book and I plan to use the technique again.)
I'm sitting under a tropical flowering shade tree on a Maui Beach behind the ResortQuest condominiums. I have three choices for connection, two from wifi and one through my EVDO card. I stayed her last year and none of these worked from the beach. I am 12 feet from the blue and balmy Pacific and I'm emailing people in the US, Canada, Australia and Ireland.Progress has inched forward and if you are ambivalent about it's relentless leaps and crawls, I am.
I've been coming to Maui for a very long time. On one hand, the sea and mountains, the volcanos, lavendar farms, garrish shorts and bronzed beack lovers have remained the same. We eat at mostly the same restaurants and go out on the same boats.
But on the other hand a great deal has changed. This morning I ran on the old south highway that runs from Kaanapali Shores to Kapalua. It is no more than a city street where you can occasionally glimpse the ocean between the palatial vacation homes and timeshares of people who call other places their homes. I have jogged here many times before and I used to see more ocean because the houses were smaller and belonged to locals who are being herded by economics to inland and upland places--away from the beaches that tourists will pay inflated dollars to touch. I jogged pass a shabby and inexpensive Internet Cafe. I think last year it was a snorkle shop.
When I first came here, you saw Hawaians and Hawaiian culture everywhere. On the southeast corner of the island, past Kehai and before Makenah Beah, you'd see the locals partying, surfing, barbecuing and guzzling all over a majestic stretch of beach and huts. That's all gone now, replaced by the new Four Seasons, a very posh Hyatt and other topnotch hotels. Now, most of the Hawaians I see are working in hotels or hawking guided tours in street kyosks, where others used to offer what they said was Maui Wowie and more often than not was dried horse manure
Before you think of me getting on a soapbox to bemoan the good old days, I am one of those tourists who call elsewhere my home. When I have top dollars I gladly exchange them for an ocean front in a nice hotel. While I'm aware of the intrusion of geek devices to beaches, I find it utterly cool to use them to write pieces like this.
But I cannot help but notice the irony of it all. Technology has been changing the way things were ever since the wheel and fire and for the most part the world is indeed a better place because of it. But we all tend to bemoan the change. The ncidence abound. While bloggers held an unconference in one section of Bangalore earlier this year, rioting in protest of cultural corruption ignited fires and took lives in a more impovershed neighborhood. El Quaida's most fundamental hatred of the west seems to be an objection to the culture we spread on soil they consider to be sacred.
But the change keeps accelerating. We are now a small, fast, flat world. In a few weeks, I will begin visiting people in places I never imagined I'd see. I'll be learning about how the world has recently changed and how the world will change in the near term.
This is exciting. But whether the new world is brave or kind or gentle, or sterile remains to be seen. Whether there is an continuity with the ways of forgotten ancestors remans to be seen.
