Doubtless, many of you have heard about the fires in Hawaii. My niece has a house right on front street. Not only does she have a house, but her business is joined to it.
When the fire started, her husband says, “Hey, there’s a fire; we’ve got to get out!” They grabbed their little dog and one or two things, jumped in the car, and drove out. Just as they drove out, the barriers were being put up, and they trapped everybody. If they had delayed just a few minutes, they would have been one of the ones burned up in the cars that you saw on television.
Watching this unfold, we are hearing about all sorts of strange things, such as the water department being asked to increase the water pressure because everyone was trying to spray things down. I grew up out in the west where we have forest fires all the time, and you want to spray everything down, get it all damp, get it all wet, right before the sparks get there.
During this crisis, there was no water pressure. Five hours later, they turned on the water after the request. What’s that deal?
Well, I started checking around because that’s weird. Kaleo Manuel, the deputy director of the State of Hawaii’s Commission for Water Resource Management, was the gentleman responsible for making that decision.
I want you to catch something with me. Worldview determines how people vote on policy, how people create policy, and how people execute policy. I think there’s a connection here.
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President Obama’s Foundation has a special page dedicated to Kaleo Manuel, published before the fire occurred. This is what it says about him on that page:
He believes that ancient wisdom and traditional ecological knowledge of native peoples will help save the Earth. Kaleo is passionate about elevating native and indigenous ways of knowing in all spheres of discourse and dialogue.
I also want to address an interview that, while recorded a couple of years ago, points to Manuel’s ideology. Could it be that he did not turn the water on because of his philosophy? In this interview, he talks about water as something that shouldn’t be used but instead something that should be worshipped:
The commission is responsible per our authorizing statute to protect and manage all water resources in the state. One water is like taking it and looking at it from a holistic system perspective. That’s not any different than how Hawaiians traditionally manage water.
You know, in essence, we, as native Hawaiians, treated water as one of the earthy manifestations of a god, an Akua Kāne. So that reverence for a resource and that reciprocity in relationship was something that was really, really important to our worldview and well-being, living [on] an island isolated from other civilizations.
So I think where it shifted to today, or over time, is that we’ve become used to looking at water as something which we use and not necessarily something that we revere as that thing that gives us life. Right?
To me, it’s a shift in value set. If we can start to really look at how we, as humans on an island, can reconnect to that traditional value set. My motto was always to let water connect us and not divide us, like we can share it, but it requires true conversations about equity.
Water is not something to be used but something to be worshipped? We need to reconnect with the idea of worshiping water? That’s exactly what he was saying. Did that influence his decision? I don’t know. But it would make sense.
This points back to his cultural roots. Friends, I just want to say this as clearly as I can… You and I have to be very careful not to be seduced by a doctrine of demons today. The doctrine that your cultural roots are something you need to go back to.
You don’t want to go back to the pre-Jesus paganism. Friends, you don’t want to go back to your cultural roots. You want to go towards Jesus. The paganism of our cultural roots, and I mean in every culture, is wicked, immoral, godless, and evil. That’s why Jesus died: to save us from our sins and to save us from this sort of insanity.
