THE GUEMES ISLAND ALOHA STORY – 02/05/2007
November 16, 2011
Guemes Island Ferry trying to get home in a windstorm.
HALLOWEEN, our favorite time of the year!Why do I tell this now? I am not certain, but it is yet another story about our precious island and the ferry crew that brings us home!
It was in the mid 90’s that myself and several other males of Guemes began wearing Hawaiian Aloha shirts. We would get them at Soroptomist and other used clothing stores.
Well, as it happened we began to all wear them on Mondays and we called it ALOHA MONDAY. It was a way of warming up the first day of the work week, making folks laugh and have fun. The idea took off and one day we saw the Guemes Island Ferry Crew ALL wearing Aloha Shirts. It was grand!!!! Everybody loved it! The visual warmed our hearts and spirit and everybody who got on the ferry on those Mondays could not help but to feel good and to feel like we were family so to speak.
This lasted for a few months and then one Monday the ferry crew did not have their Aloha Shirts on and it turned out that the COUNTY FOLKS decided that it was improper and for whatever reasons they gave, which I do not personally know, meant that the crew could no longer wear ‘their’ shirts.
Of course it was not a big deal, I mean what’s in a shirt but the person under it, right? What it did do was undermine the joy that people were having and it was a sign that our elected guides of the county were taking charge and implementing their regimented codes to take the fun out of our lives.
It was really a small thing wasn’t it? It was just clothing being changed or was it more? Was it showing us that our elected guides were even then in this small matter making rules that would alter our lives in a very personal way. I mean really, what the bleep does it matter as long as it is safe!!!!
Unfortunately we who live on this island have seen how far these misguided guides are willing to go in their undermining the island life of those who reside here. They are bad guides….even a grade school child could see this and understand it.
There is NO lightheartedness anymore…we are at the whims of leaders who mismanage public funds and who are guilty now of major mismanagement. Our elected officials apparently do not work for the concerns of the citizens who elected them. The condition is prevalent at all levels of the current governmental administration.
It is a sad state of affairs and we who still have ‘hearts’ are once again deprived of a good and wholesome way of life that we cherish.
I for one do still remember what I was told about the people from whom my family line descended as we came off the deck of the Mayflower that brought them here from England where they were being taxed by a government that was corrupt. The courageous leaders and intelligent men and women of that time wrote a Constitution that would keep ‘the people’ free and unencumbered by a totalitarian government.
Do we remember what it said?
Those ideas and guiding instructions have been outrageously disregarded and defiled.
Those of us who believe in the spirit of ‘aloha’ and who live on and love this little piece of rock that we find ourselves drawn to know that we have found ‘our place of belonging’.
It is time to put on our ‘Aloha Shirts’ (spiritually speaking) yet once again if only to make a mockery of what foolish rulers, authorities and those who should be in charge do when they can’t stretch their minds to understand the true needs of their fellow beings.
Leo E. Osborne
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