I copied this from a post on another site that I frequent.
At the height of last year’s gubernatorial campaign season, I saw the above ad on a web forum I used to frequent. I was immediately appalled at its portrayal of the two kids who looked na’ma’ase’ about the fenced-in playground and jungle gym. But a few minutes of deeper thought into the ad made me more and more ma’ggodai, because the ad completely misrepresented the anger I feel when I think about the militarization of Guåhan.
I kept thinking about how this particular team was focused on the fenced-in playground instead of the radiation in our water and the occupation of the land that has been stripped away from so many of our people. Of course, the text of the ad shows an attempt of trying to convince us of their concerns about life “outside the fence,” but as skillfully written as it was, I was removed farther from the idea that this campaign would ever promote my indigenous right to determine for myself whether or not I want tens of thousands more people to come to the island as swiftly as I would take a sip of lukewarm åhu.
I have very little tolerance and very much disdain for those among us who believe that without the militarization of the island that we couldn’t prosper. While it is true that there have been many contributions made by the military community those contributions will never be tantamount to the destruction that’s been left behind for us to deal with.
Someone once passed along a note to me to let me know that something had gone wrong inside the fence that caused the leak of thousands upon thousands of gallons of raw sewage, but nothing of the sort was ever reported by local media sources. Whether or not we will ever find out the truth is beyond me at this point.
And now they want more land—land that is already occupied or owned by our people. They want to take this land to screw it all up for war games and to practice how to kill people (otherwise known as defending my right to write freely). And then when they decide to leave, we might be lucky enough for the feds to return the shitty land back to our people so we can try to grow cucumbers or watermelons to build futures for our children only to find out later on that the soil is far too contaminated for anything to grow.
But the ad… the ad says nothing about how the gubernatorial hopefuls were going to address these issues. Why would they? It would cost them their reputation of being unpatriotic to the mother nation—surely it wouldn’t be wise to claim patriotism to their “Guamanians” first.
The ignorance of this team to their indigenous constituency is na’mamahlao to me. But now that they’re in office, it’s even sillier to me that they want to continue to announce that they’re looking forward to exercising our right to self-determination. Scary thing is: I don’t think they know what they’re talking about—but they’re in charge now.
