Stop ignoring it
Stop ignoring it
Regarding Wednesday’s comments on Hilo’s declining downtown (Your Views, Tribune-Herald), the problem really is very serious and has worsened noticeably along Bayfront streets and in local parks. Homeless people sprawl in shop entryways even during daylight business hours, smoking, drinking and doing drugs.
Landscaped borders reek of feces, urine, vomit and rotting rubbish. Discarded hypodermic syringes are strewn about in some places. Beggars are aggressive and then turn violent and abusive when ignored, sometimes shouting profanities or chasing people down.
Hawaii’s ancient “Law of the Splintered Paddle” permits sleeping by roadways, so police avoid the situation.
I was accosted by a pair of local youth gang troublemakers as I walked out of the Tribune-Herald newspaper office on Kinoole Street just last week. Often, they’ll demand cigarettes or a light as a pretext for approaching close for a mugging.
Last May, I was assaulted on Kamehameha Avenue in front of the Pacific Tsunami Museum by one of these shirtless, tattooed meth addicts who walked alongside then sucker-punched me in the head for refusing to give him a lighter. If he’d been holding a weapon, I wouldn’t writing this now.
It’s time we stopped ignoring this problem, because it affects everyone’s lives in our community. Downtown can be an appealing, prosperous place again with some effort and the capital investment it now lacks.
Eliot Greenleaf
Hilo
‘No’ to refugees
I am disturbed that the State of Hawaii is offering to accept thousands of Syrian refugees — not because I object to refugees being offered safe haven in the U.S., but because this remote state of only a little more than 1 million residents is not a logical place to send them, and because we do not have resources to care for them.
How can we accept refugees when we have so many homeless people we cannot help and (a lack of low-income housing)?
We have thousands of disabled, elderly and low-income residents and veterans we can’t provide adequate services for right now. How can we possibly care for refugees?
Volunteer organizations provide a massive amount of aid for our needy. We can’t ask them to do more. And in a state with such a small population and very little industry, there are few opportunities to create more revenue outside of raising taxes.
If we are to consider raising taxes for programs that help those in need, I for one feel strongly that aid should go to the needy all around us here today. Charity begins at home.
Laura Buck
Keaau