Came to say the same. A lot of these asshats have enough resources that they could simply ask, “How can I help? Where is help needed?” But instead, it’s “Why am I waiting so long for my cocktails?”
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I can agree with you but people like leave/forget all distinctions as someone else pointed out someone asking about a reservation may not know if the restaurant was in the impacted area. Just because you imagine them whining doesn’t me they were. Maybe they were concerned? People’s moods thoughts change through out the day. It is entirely possible for an individual to go and volunteer or write a check to the local food bank one moment and then be overheard an hour later discussing how their chartered fishing trip out of Lahaina had to be cancelled. I know that it’s a lot easier to just be mad at people and imagine them as simple caricatures, but in my experience everyone I’ve ever interacted and met with has had a rich internal life that often contains contradictions. So I go out on a limb and assume that’s mostly true of everyone I haven’t met. Unfortunately a lot people in the comments here like to extrapolate wildly from any comment they can to build up an imagined enemy that they can safely hate. To each their own I guess.
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There’s a lot of that going around.
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Yes, who knows what any single individual is actually thinking, but you’re doing your own oversimplification, by completely ignoring how wealth insulates people and more often than not, turns them into entitled asshats.
That’s what “White Lotus” is largely about, and why that series is the perfect reference point here (and all the more on point because the first season was filmed right where these asshats are expecting uninterrupted luxury).
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Gazing and tasting seem among the better behaviours of tourists.
Sure, but it’d be better if more tourists were aware of more than just their own behavior, like say, the whole inequitable set of economic relations within which they’re chugging along so blithely (and often complainingly).
I think that’s what Kincaid is getting at (the quote is from Small Island, a book about her home, Antigua).
(Banksy, maybe)
Edit: Oops, confused it with Andrea Levy’s book (which is also great!).
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I’m sorry but this little blurb of an article here on BB is misleading AF. We were staying in Kihei the week of the fires and Tuesday evening (the night Lahaina burned) NO ONE seemed to know anything about the fires-- not the ones maybe half a mile away just across Pi’ilani Highway and certainly not in Lahaina. Folks around us were having trouble getting cellular signals and there seemed to be NO data service-- so information was hard to come by. (we later learned because this was due to winds and fire damaging and destroying comms infrastructure) That evening hotel management told us to pack our bags and get ready to evacuate (which didn’t happen) but no one had any information on just where the fires were, if there were fire crews fighting them, etc. Just NO INFORMATION. So, if some richy-rich type inquires about their restaurant reservation in Lahaina on the day after the fire (Wednesday) I’ll cut them some slack-- maybe they didn’t watch the local news (which was lacking much useful information). We had plans to take the ferry over to Lana’i Wednesday morning and I called the car rental agency on Lana’i and canceled (in what I though was just an abundance of caution) and neither I nor the folks on Lana’i new that Lahaina had in fact burned to the ground. We looked at making an early departure but there were no seats available out of Maui’s tiny airport-- it was clogged with people that absolutely NEEDED to leave the island so we just stayed put and didn’t venture outside Kihei. We weren’t competing for resources, we weren’t on the road getting in the way of emergency vehicles, etc. All the money that we were going to spend on transit, rentals, etc we just added to donations we made to local recovery orgs (and the Lana’i Cat Sanctuary).
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Thank you for donating.
Comms can be chaos during a catastrophe.
I appreciate that you were willing to give other people priority in case they had their own emergencies.
Stay safe and good luck.
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