Helemano Lee

I was in high school, I believe it was my freshman year at Kamehameha.  You could hear the church bells ringing down below in the valley and the PA system came on and made an announcement that Hawaii was just voted in as the 50th state of Hawaii and everybody kind of jumped up and screamed and was celebrating and the only celebrating I was doing was that I could get out of my Algebra class early. And went down for a rally that they had for the students and that was the excitement of becoming a state. But as I've gone through my life I realized that we really were not a state, through my studies, through my listening of other people talk, by going to rallies and things I realized that we're really not a state,. But the people of Hawaii were told that we needed to become a state for various reasons.  Some of the reasons I remember them was that we had no representation that we voted on. Our people were told that we needed to be able to vote for the president.  We needed to be able to vote for our governor, which we were not at that time as a territory. The governor was appointed to his position.  We had no say.  So that was the lines that they were using with our people was that we had taxation.. we had no representation.  We had no voice in the running of our lives, our daily lives... that we were being overly taxed and that we would save money by becoming a state which of course was never true.  But that's what convinced people to ratify the statehood vote. That's why I believe that after learning about was had conspired in the time of Lili'uokalani's reign, how she was overthrown, how congress voted Hawaii to become a territory, all of these events, apology bills, President Cleveland's statement to congress about the atrocities that the United States had done to this Hawaiian kingdom.  All of these points point to the fact that we are really not a state.  We're illegally made a state. Some of the changes that I've seen is more taxation, more waha, you'd understand what the waha is.. all talk no substance.  More taxation, less benefits, broken trusts.  Hawaii was entrusted to the U.S. to take care of us, to watch out for our welfare, our well-being, the state of Hawaii's constitution states that the Hawaiian people were to be taken care of, and thus far not a lot has really happened, or evolved into that direction. All we really want today is the right to govern ourselves like any other peoples in the world that want that right to govern themselves.

If unable to view quicktime video click here. You will be redirected to fifdififdi.com.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.