Notes from the Road: No Kings (Except Kamehameha) Day in Hawaii

"The crowd was characteristically diverse, with folks of all backgrounds forming a kind of spontaneous beloved community of resistance."

I spent the No Kings Day Protest last Saturday at the Queen Ka’ahumanu Center in Kahului, Maui, joining an impressive crowd of 3,500-5,000 locals at a gathering organized by Indivisible Hawaii. Having watched the invasion of Los Angeles by the National Guard and Marines only days after arriving here, there was no question we would find a No Kings rally to attend wherever we were. The fact that we were in our home away from home was somehow fitting.

My wife’s family has had a place here in June for 35 years. As teachers, it always corresponds well with the end of our semester, and it gives us something to carefully save for and look forward to during the school year. We don’t really do the tourist thing. Instead, it’s a chance to live in a different place for a month, soak in local culture, and simply be away from our workaday lives.

In recent years, what had been a place of deep relaxation has been overtaken by the trials and tribulations of life and the world. Two years ago, I was struck with catastrophic autoimmune hepatitis and barely made it back in time to get to a hospital in San Diego where I eventually got an emergency liver transplant. We have also been here through family cancer diagnoses, various other medical emergencies, and memorial services as well as the issues that came in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and catastrophic wildfires. In sum, we lived here, warts and all, in patches over several decades. We have even thought of moving here permanently, but, as with so many others, we are slowly getting priced out.

Indeed, as I waited for and recovered from my transplant two years ago, I experienced that life transforming trauma while watching the place I had just been to and love very deeply suffer immensely—the scorched land, Lahaina devastated, images of people leaping into the ocean to escape the oncoming flames. All these sights are burned into my memory.

We did not come here the year after my surgery not only because it wasn’t yet safe for me to fly but also because the island was not ready, still impacted by the collective psychological, economic, and social scars of the disaster. We sent money to the food bank, contributed to local environmental groups, and hoped for a sustained recovery that would bring back not only the tourist economy but some semblance of a just recovery for the people who work and live here full time.

This has and has not happened. While some things have bounced back, Lahaina is still largely devastated and there are conflicting views about how to rebuild, with some proposing to simply reload business as usual while others are thinking about how to resurrect something that does more justice to local people, their cultures, and the environment. The latter camp’s position is best summarized by a bumper sticker emblazoned on a surfer’s pickup by the shoreline: “Keep Lahaina Lands in Lahaina Hands.”

Alex Hu of the City Journal outlines some of the complex factors that are behind Lahaina’s delayed recovery:

These long delays are a consequence of Maui’s deep political dysfunction. Maui residents have long been furious at their leaders for allowing housing prices to quadruple over the past 20 years. The issue is not complex: a hostile regulatory environment has kept homebuilding from keeping pace with population growth. The only homes that do get built are typically large vacation properties for global elites, as those are the only projects that can turn a profit.

The Maui County Council has nine seats, split five-to-four between rival visions for the future. One side wants to keep Maui rural and closed to outsiders, consequences be damned. The other recognizes that allowing luxury tourism is the best way to expand the economy quickly and pay for public services . . .

The political divide has only grown wider since the fires. Aside from activists seeking Internet fame by provoking viral confrontations at public meetings, radical councilmembers have called their pro-building colleagues names like “colonizer,” openly questioned what would happen if they defied Hawaii state law promoting homebuilding, and advocated for secession from the United States. A general spirit of conspiracy and bad faith pervades the island’s politics.

This polarization stems from the County of Maui’s complex political geography, which has fostered overlapping layers of mistrust toward “outsiders.” Some residents resent the U.S. federal government for the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, while many even distrust the state government. Since 70 percent of Hawaii’s population lives on Oahu, Maui residents—who make up just 10 percent—often feel that state decisions are made without understanding their needs.

Thus, the fires and their aftermath have laid bare the many socio-economic and cultural contradictions in Maui. As with the other Hawaiian Islands, Maui is weighted with a history of hurt and imperiled by a level of over-tourism that threatens to love it to death.

So even before the fires, visiting Maui was always paradoxical, a trip to a stunningly gorgeous place that was also a site of ecocide, extinction, and genocidal colonialism. The sovereignty movement is still robust in Hawaii even while others see both the trap and the economic benefit of tourism. There are no easy answers. The best thing to do as a frequent visitor is to tread lightly, shop local, and try to be mindful about your relationship to other people and the environment.

Slow down, show respect, be kind.

This year, as the semester ended at the college where I teach, we found ourselves overtaken by history once again as ICE raids hit our San Diego neighborhood, sending shockwaves through the community. I was finishing grading finals as I dealt with an illness exacerbated by my immunocompromised status and felt relieved just to be able to make our flight and get to Maui in decent shape.

Once there, we had a day to settle in before Trump unleashed ICE on Los Angeles and the city, state, and county blew up into a full-blown crisis, with me, yet again, watching a disaster unfold across an ocean expanse, talking to friends and family, and feeling the world all too much with us.

On our first full day, we drove to Wailuku for a street fair where we listened to a Hawaiian ukelele player sing and tell stories about how the mountains in the distance behind him had all been renamed by colonizers and how he had made it his task to rediscover the old names. It was a beautiful scene on a humid, cloudy evening, and the street was buzzing with good feeling, the sound of music, children playing, and people greeting each other with hugs and big smiles. A singer asked if anyone could dance hula and a woman volunteered and performed for a song or two with the band. She was lovely, elegant, joyful.

In that moment, I felt something I had been missing in the months since Trump took office—grace. Somehow it seems to have escaped us.

After the band was done, we stopped in front of the window of an art shop that sold local versions of a kind of 60s-style poster art with Hawaiian themes. I remember back during the Bernie runs that the artist had a big psychedelic themed poster of Sanders in the window there. Sanders won big in Hawaii, drawing support from the vital, incredibly diverse, immigrant working class communities here that are still steeped in a rich labor history. Hawaii, back in the militant ‘30s, was CIO country. It was there we saw the poster for the No Kings Day rally that we were hoping to find.

A few days before the rally we happened to run into a couple from Canada next to an inlet where we had stopped on our hike to watch a turtle inch its way on shore for a rest. The couple, a cop and a social worker, were from Edmonton.

“I’m sorry our President is an asshole,” I said. They laughed so we knew we were in good company.

She worked with First Nation communities, and he did community relations and helped screen new hires, frequently sorting out candidates with rightwing or racist ties that would make them bad cops, alienated from the community. He noted that the police were different in the U.S., more likely to have an authoritarian bent. He recognized it, he told me, from his own work trying to diffuse rightwing tensions in Canada.

“It’s a shame to see what’s happening,” he said. He was going to retire soon and was glad because, despite the recent election in his country, the rise of the right made his job very difficult. They had friends in Nicaragua, Hawaii, all over the world.

“It’s really hard to fly any flags anymore,” he said. “What kind of world will our kids have?”

I just nodded and shook his hand.

The day of the rally, I woke up and checked the news only to see that there had been a political assassination in Minnesota. My phone was full of text messages and pictures from family and friends in California and on the east coast attending No Kings rallies and marches. They were exuberant with almost everyone reporting that the events were even larger than expected. This served as a bit of a counterweight to the news from Minnesota and the menace of war rising in the Middle East.

My wife, son and his girlfriend, and I drove across the valley, past barren former cane fields and the abandoned shell of the old sugar mill to the mall in Kahului just off the main drag. The entire population of Kahalui is only a bit over 27,000 so we had no idea what to expect as we drove into the parking lot a few minutes before the protest was supposed to start. Thus, it was nice to see a healthy crowd of several hundred people already gathered before the official start time.

We walked up to a stack of signs on the grass by the sidewalk and asked if we could grab one. “Absolutely,” said the woman minding the pile. Bob Marley was booming from a loudspeaker, and as we made our way over to the sidewalk, we told her that we had come from California. “Occupied territory,” she joked ruefully.

It was a thick, humid day, but the mood was joyful, defiant. The crowd grew larger, minute by minute as people streamed in, and the line of protesters along the street stretched out, block by block, filling the organizers with glee as one of them strode by occasionally announcing the size of the crowd as it swelled from 500 to 1,000, to 2,500, to 3,500, to 5,000. The signs were familiar swipes at Trump with lots of creative art and humor along with some distinctive Hawaiian touches, like “YAAAS QUEENS, NO KINGS!” and “Aloha: Always Love Over Hate Always.” There were drummers, folks selling banana bread, dancers, and a man waving a gigantic “NOPE!” flag.

The crowd was characteristically diverse, with folks of all backgrounds forming a kind of spontaneous beloved community of resistance. It was the same day as Maui Pride, so the rainbow flag was woven throughout the crowd. Cars drove by and honked with gusto and people flashed the hang loose sign and yelled their approval out their windows.

The rally had the feeling of a block party as the reggae mixed with protest songs, dance music, punk rock, and Hawaiian soul. Here, the pickup trucks are largely driven by workers from immigrant and/or indigenous families, so their response was distinctly NOT MAGA as they pumped fists or blew their horns happily. They were joined by surfers, hippies, retirees, construction and hotel workers, as well as whole families on their Saturday errands, surprised and pleased to see the spectacle of the protest pop up and flower in their town.

I took the opportunity to walk the several blocks of the line and was moved by the smiles and small conversations. People snapped pictures of each other, hugged, laughed, and kept saying in one way or another, how wonderful it was to be there.

I found myself moved to tears at one point after passing by a trio of young women with a sign that said, “Nobody is Illegal on Stolen Land,” realizing what a precious and tenuous dream was the America about which Langston Hughes wrote, “Let American be the dream the dreamers dream—Let it be that great strong land of love/Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme/That any man be crushed by one above./(It never was America to me).”

Other than that, it was just another day in paradise.