You’ve got five minutes until the end of the world…
This is our cruel reality, today, and every day for a couple of reasons. We have governments all over the world run by toddlers who argue about who’s “toys” are bigger. We have natural disasters every day that seem to occur more frequently rather than less. Every day, our world ends.
At 8:06 this morning, my phone rang. But it’s not the ring of a friend calling for a chat. It’s the sound an ambulance makes when rushing to the hospital. Insistent. Piercing. Crushing. Something is wrong, seriously wrong.
At 8:06 on the morning of January 13, 2018, a warning went out to the public saying that a ballistic missile was on its way to Hawaii. Find shelter immediately. Stay indoors, away from windows, get into your bathroom and don’t come out until you’re given an all-clear, or until the passing of two full weeks.
Here’s my reaction: What?
I’m a college student in Washington State. I leave tomorrow on a plane back to Olympia. This is my last full day with my family. A missile threat is NOT in the itinerary. And if it was, it would’ve been color-coded. Look in my planner I dare you! Classes start on Tuesday, I get in late Sunday night, head back to the dorms on Monday, need to prepare a blog post for Thursday, oh wait! Bomb threat on Saturday. Where the hell was that when I was making my schedule?!?! I would’ve put it in red! Bright red! So that I would remember to put water in the tub. And charge the batteries in everything. And to dress for success. And put on my shoes! These are things you have to prepare for! Not something that you can accomplish within MINUTES!!!
Here’s another point of view, also mine: You’re kidding me, right?
For five generations, Hawaii has been my family’s home. First it was a kingdom, then an independent republic, a territory, and then a state, and all that time, my family has stood by and watched through takeovers, wars, hostile relations, and now, with one missile, the islands that I love will be gone.
It takes about twenty minutes for a ballistic missile to reach Hawaii from its most-likely sender. It takes about eight minutes for a warning to sound to all those brave souls fortunate to be in Hawaii when a missile is about to hit. That leaves plus-or-minus twelve minutes to run for your lives, scream and shout, gather all the survival gear you can carry, in short, you have twelve minutes…
Glass half full, you also have twelve minutes to live.
So, with eight minutes to live until your last, how do you fill them?
When 8:16 passes and you’re still alive, it’s time to get dressed. The coffee is gone, you’re about ready to pee, and you’ve got clothes to wash, a suitcase to pack, and an island to say goodbye to. No more alarms have been sent, the television works as normal, your brother’s still on the phone, in Montana with a cold, and your breakfast dishes are still dirty. Life, as it tends to do, moves on without you.
8:30 passes and still, there is no sign of anything. Not a swish in the wind, not a bird falling out of the sky. The cows still need to be fed, the plants still need to be watered, the cats and dogs need to eat. Go feed them damn it! Time doesn’t stop for a flippin’ missile!
But let’s say a ballistic missile does hit Hawaii, which to be perfectly honest, it probably will at one point or another. Alarms go off, sirens ring across the state as they should have, had the threat been real. You stay in your house, away from the windows, get all your canned goods in order, and boom. Congratulations! Unless you are in a supper-shelter, you have now joined the zombies in their legion of most-likely dead.
Here’s another scenario: You survive, you wait the two weeks, and you live the rest of your days with radiation poisoning. Sounds like a blast… No pun intended.
Okay. So you survive. The landscape you know has been obliterated. Many of the people you have walked through life with are no longer beside you, food is scarce, and you are very literally on your own. That scenario is not one I want to live. Who wants to be alone in a survival situation? Who wants to walk into an abandoned Target in the middle of the day just to shop for food that is poisoned? Who wants to go to the beach, catch some waves, and then discover all the little fishies in the sea floating around because they too have been poisoned?
Raise your hand if you want to visit Hawaii, not as a tourist destination, but as a sight of a nuclear attack.
This is my reality. In over fifty years, the United States has come a long way. Hawaii became a state. We’ve established countless wildlife refuges for plants and animals, both on land and in water. For Pete’s sake, I skype with my friends and family back home almost every week where I see their beautiful faces without being in the same time-zone. And yet, in Hawaii, we have to worry about a nuclear attack…
My grandmother was a little girl when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. They had just gotten home from church on Sunday morning, and the chaos had already begun. Know why Pearl Harbor was such a disaster? Because no one saw it coming.
But that’s a lie too, because we all know in Hawaii that a warning was sounded, but that same warning was ignored. Imagine living on a chain of islands whose only selling points are tourism and the military. As a resident, you don’t matter. You do, but marginally at best. So when you get an alert on your phone saying that a missile is about to end it all, threat or not, you are going to freak the hell out. It took a full thirty minutes for word to reach the public that this threat was a mistake, but they said Pearl Harbor was a mistake too. They said the tsunami that hit Laupahoehoe in 1946 was a mistake as well. And the overthrow of the Hawaiian government, and statehood, and let’s just put it out there:
Everything besides Lilo and Stitch and Moana, in the eyes of anyone who does not understand Hawaii, will be a mistake. But of course, I like those movies too…
What I’m trying to say, Ladies and Gentlemen, is that Hawaii is forgettable. If there was a disaster, natural or otherwise, where would we go? Evacuation on an island is limited because it relies on outside sources. If a nuke hits, we in Hawaii know that we are on our own.
I’m sure some of you reading this will be appalled by my language, my callousness, my tongue-and-cheek manner, but I’ve done enough sugar-coating for a lifetime. What does it mean to live in Hawaii? Being honest--it’s not easy...
This doesn’t mean I’ve lost faith in the government, in fact, I think that we would band together in such a situation and maybe, just maybe, we would be okay. But here’s my reality: I have to have faith in all of you. We have to have faith in each other.
Here’s my message, sent from a college student, sitting on a crowded flight back to Washington:
I live in a world where I am constantly moving. I move into my dorm in September, and because of this, I have to move out of my home on Maui. At Christmas time, I pack up my things, take my stuffed bunny, and move back home for a few weeks. When Christmas ends, a new year starts, and I move again, back into a lonely dorm room. I say goodbye to all the friends and family that I know, send out presents for birthdays and Valentine’s Day as I can, and I leave for another semester in a foreign land. My entire life at this point is about saying goodbyes. My cat, my dog, my mom and dad, my best friend, my island. I can’t say I enjoy it, in fact, I’m sitting next to a man who I’m sure is wondering why I’m about to cry for the second time since take-off. But here’s what I know: When you say goodbye, you have to say hello.
I say goodbye to an island, but I say hello to trees, big black birds, my buddies the squirrels, and the family that I have built within my college. I say hello to new classes, professors who I know, and some who I am meeting for the first time. I say hello to being alone yes, but to also to my independent streak, that to be honest, runs a little too deep. I say goodbye to a part of my life, but I say hello to a new chapter.
The reason that we fear death as humans is that we don’t know what it is. Does it hurt? Will I remember? And perhaps most important: What comes next? But if death is coming for me, today, tomorrow, or somewhere down the line, I say let it come. I’ve lived this long, haven’t I? If my time is up, well then, I’ve just begun a new journey, one that I welcome just as much as any other.
And again, I know some of you will be angry with me for saying this, but I cannot apologize for reality, for opinion, for truth. Here is my truth: live every day as if it will be your last, but why should your last day be any different than just a normal day? Why worry about something so natural as dying, even if it comes at the hand of an unnatural force? Here I employ one of my favorite sayings: it is what it is, and it isn’t what it ain’t. I added that last part, but for good reason. One, because it makes sense to me, and two, because I can.
Live today as if it is your tomorrow. Live tomorrow as if it is your today. Don’t say goodbye, say, as my best friend said when we hugged this morning, “a hui ho,” until next time.
If my life were a novel, here would be a break in the pages. A little mark, maybe a hand-drawn embellishment, for here is my next chapter. Missile threat today, plane tomorrow, Washington the next. I’ve got my sails drawn, I have no regrets in my past, and here I am, living my own truth through these words:
A hui ho, Maui. May you still be there when I get back, with soft waves rolling along the sand, mountains and rain forests with a mind of their own, and the friends and family that I could not live without. A hui ho…
