The plan for our community service was to go to Wawamalu beach for an 808 Cleanup event to clean the beach. Anu and I were supposed to go, but that didn’t work out, because for Christmas she had a surprise trip so she couldn’t make it. So what ended up happening was that my friend from Moanalua and I ended up going to the cleanup. It wasn’t too bad, it was just a regular beach cleanup, we walked around the beach and picked up trash. The cleanup went well, I feel like it was very productive. My friend and I were able to pick up a lot of trash. The supervisor was also very cooperative with filling out the interview. I feel like the actual clean up went very well, the only thing that would have made it better if my group was there. But that is just how it happened, next time I feel like it will go better because we learned from this experience, and will do better in planning it next time. Personally, I always felt like I had a relatively good understanding of poverty, and other UN issues, but this project helped me see how many problems this world actually has. I really just didn’t realize the number of issues the world had. My leadership skills definitely improved from this project. I had to take the initiative to email the supervisor to get him to take the interview. The 2 philosophers that related to my Kahiau project were Baruch Spinoza and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I chose these to philosophers to relate most to my Kahiau project was because their quotes and achievements were related to my Kahiau which is pollution. Baruch was an ethics, science, and math professor pollution is related to all those subjects. His quote was “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free” I felt that this quote was especially relevant to my Kahiau project to because to deal with a project you have to be able to fully understand it. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was also an ethics philosopher. I really liked his quote it said “A man can do what a man ought to do, and when he says he cannot it is because he will not.” I liked it because it showed how if we as humans really tried to deal with pollution and work together we would be able to do it. The only thing stopping us is ourselves not following through. The philosophers that I chose that closely related to my own personal values was Rene Descartes and Issac Newton. I was intrigued but these famous philosophers quotes. Rene Descartes was a philosopher that challenged society and he had the courage to even challenge the existence of God during his time. His quote was “It is not enough to have a good mind the main thing is to use it well.” I like this quote because it talks about how you can have all the tools to be great but you are the person that has to apply them to get what you want. The other philosopher I chose was Issac Newton who is most famous by his findings on gravity. But I really felt that his values align with mine by his quote, his quote says “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” I think this quote beautifully represents me because I feel like without our past we wouldn’t be able to build our future. I feel like seeing the people around me learn and do better motivated me to do the same. Personally, I feel like if I don’t keep learning and growing I will be left behind by my peers. So that is my main drive to do better besides my grades and my parents. My group for my kahiau project motivates me because I feel like we all have a different job in our project and even though they are all different each job is essential. So to summarize, I am motivated by the people who depend on me. As someone who has seen great leaders preach about our issue first had, I know that it would take a lot to campaign this issue and to inspire people to acknowledge it. A leader that faces our issue would need to be very strong and perseverant because pollution isn’t an issue that could just go away in a year. We as a species inhabiting this earth have to accept the fact that in the past our people have done wrong to our planet and take responsibility for it. By addressing this issue a leader would have to deal with all the people that feel differently towards the issue and all the different ideas people have. Meaning they would have to have a very steady head to be able to handle all these people and make the right decision for this issue. A leader is someone that is the face and makes decisions for the greater good for everyone. To be able to address both the big and small picture for our issue they would have to be very inspiring to others and have a persuasive presence. If they can’t make people want to help this issue then we wouldn’t even have the facilities to execute our ideas. For each issue and organization, different leaders with different skills are essential to be successful. All leaders are different, but if someone were to internationally represent the face of change they would need to have these traits. We definitely didn’t learn are lesson from WWI. If a war is called a War to End all Wars, I would think there wouldn’t be any wars after it. But only 20 years after the end of WWI ended, WWII started, there was the Vietnam war, and the Cold war, and even right now we are on the verge of war. Personally, I don’t really think that WWI still affects my Kahiau project, but I think it did when it was going on, and all the other wars are just making it harder to clean up the effects of WWI. During wars there is a lot of death and destruction which isn’t good for our environment, and since WWI we haven’t really gotten a break from it. Meaning that there are so many wars that have been back to back that we need to find time to clean up. I don’t feel like we are experiencing Malthusian Flux in our modern world. Malthusian Flux is a theory that says that the amount of food supply we have is the same, so if our population keeps growing like how it is we aren’t going to have enough food for everyone. I feel like even though there are people that are going hungry in different places it is counteracted by the people on the other side of the spectrum that is overeating and are obese. If everyone in the world ate the recommended amount of food we would be sustainable and be able to keep the population growth the same. But this will probably never happen so I will never know. From looking at the disputes in WWI and the treaty of Versaille and also taking account of Hawaiʻi’ s history in war and social revolutions there are a lot of factors to take into consideration to what could cause an event like this to happen. After the Treaty of Versailles Germany was left in ruins, they were left in economic debt and their people had no pride in their country. This is when Hitler slowly rose to power taking advantage of os Germany’s broken people. In their case, Hitler was the spark that lit a fire under Germany that made them come to a realization that they don’t need to be bullied from these other countries and they have something to be proud of. Even nowadays in our own home, we can see social revolutions breaking out, for example, Hawaiians are becoming a lot more active in their homes and perpetuating their culture. I think this is a slow social revolution that has been waiting to break out and now that we have this freedom and resources we are able to start this new revolution. So to answer the question, the factors you have to think about is the audience of people you are trying to inspire, and how you will go about doing that, are you going to inspire them with fear, anger, excitement, pride? The other factor is obviously the topic you are trying to inspire your audience with. Lastly one of the most important topics is the leader and who will be the face of this revolution. This connects to the current resurgence of Hawaiian identity because this is our own revolution. Now more and more Hawaiians are proud of their culture and what to protect and perpetuate it. We are proud of what we are and now we are going to revive our nation to its former glory. Because now we are in a new revolution. New technologies were always a blessing and a curse especially when it came to war. I think that the worst thing created for war that was used during WW2 was the atomic bomb that was set off in Hiroshima. This weapon was made only to kill, there was no good to come out of it except victory. Other technologies that affected Hawaiʻi in WW2 was when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor still affect Hawaiʻi and is a really important part of our history. The impacts of the war impact our entire existence. If the wars had a different outcomes our lives would be very different, if we were even born at all. If you go to Hiroshima you can see that all the destruction is still there. It’s not like regular pollution, but there is radiation pollution. This is just one thing that caused all this pollution, not to mention how the people at war affected the earth that they fought on. The top 3 new technologies that ended WW2 would have to be the aircraft carriers, the fighter jets, and of course the atomic bomb. Without the atomic bombs we don’t know when the war would end. We also wouldn’t know if the results would stay the same with the United States and the Allies on top. The aircraft carriers gave us the possibility to transport this huge weapon and bombs. And the fighter jets that Japan used in the bombing of Pearl Harbor was a huge part of WW2 because without it the US wouldn’t have even been apart of it. My Kahiau project is about pollution, and this issue might not seem very relevant to the war, but there are different types of pollution. There were many instances where the US deliberately bombed innocent places and would leave these places totally destroyed with radiation and nothing. So I don’t think that the US had good leadership during this time if they didn’t think of the outcome of the destruction they caused. We continue to feel the effect so these bombing, for example after Bikini Atoll was bombed it left the residents with nowhere to live so the US gave them refuge. This is why there are so many Micronesians to this day that rely on the US government fo support. The radiation poisoning from these bombs still affects people even generations after the bombing. Like in on of the videos in the presentation showed how on of the men that was affected by the bombing of bikini atoll got cancer from the radiation of the bomb and his kinds and even his grandkids also got cancer. The 3 hotspots in the Cold war was the confrontation with China, the Vietnam War, and the Korean war. All of this confrontation happened because we couldn’t agree about communism and capitalism. The confrontation with China was when the US and China were butting heads about politics. The Vietnam war is when communist North Vietnam was trying to take control of South Vietnam. This ended poorly with the US getting involved and the eventual overtaking of South Vietnam. The Korean War, otherwise known as the forgotten war was between communist China and North Korea vs. the US and South Korea. China and North Korea were trying to take control over South Korea. So the US got involved and China and North Korea didn’t get South Korea.
World War 1 definitely wasn’t the war to end all wars. Shortly following WW1 was WW2 and the Cold War. I think as Hawaiian our system was capitalism. In old Hawaiʻi, Hawaiians used bartering to survive. Bartering as an everyman for themself system which isn’t controlled by the government. I don’t really see it as a threat. Personally, the only threat that could happen would be Natives coming together to go against the US. I don’t really agree that the systems set up to help native people are that useful because there are still so many native people that aren’t getting compensated because we don’t “need” that money. The system only helps a very small part of our people.
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AuthorHi! My name is Nicole Nakagawa and I am 15 years old and a sophomore at Kamahameha Schools Kapālama. Archives
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