After the excesses and distractions of the holiday season, the month of January always seems to be a time of reckoning  — a period of paying attention to matters that have been pushed aside in the festive merriment of December and now, in the stark deadness of January, need to be faced.

When talking about a reckoning I mean confronting both personal as well as societal issues. For many, January is time to regain control of their health or credit card balance after too much holiday overeating, over-drinking or overspending. There is Dry January, January dieting and the even more popular No Spending January —meaning a time to re-set for the better.

My January reckoning has been a reminder by others I should face something more permanent: my own mortality.

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The epiphany came unexpectedly this month when I discovered I had to buy a new car after my 24-year-old Mercedes crapped out. Master mechanic Sylvester Chan had kept the car running smoothly as long as possible. He told me the part needed to fix it was no longer available in Hawaiʻi, that other parts of the engine expected to wear out in the future could be equally difficult to replace.

When I ventured out to buy a new car, I was reminded by a few well-meaning advisors to look carefully because it would be my last car. Last car! Meaning you are not going to be alive long enough to need another car. You either will be dead or too old to drive safely.

The last of anything is disheartening to contemplate. The last meal of an inmate scheduled to be executed, Jesus Christʻs last supper, the last time a fleeing refugee sees her homeland. Even as a reporter in the Vietnam war, I never woke up in the morning thinking this will be my last day.

My way of reckoning with my mortality after getting hit in the face with it while auto shopping is to know death is coming — but not today. The new Subaru Crosstrek I purchased will be my current car, not my last one.

But that has me thinking about reckonings, personal and otherwise. Former Hawaii congresswoman, now Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard should face up to the inconvenient truth this January that the president she supported because he was against regime change wars has done the exact opposite. And worse, she was frozen out of meetings to carry out the military operation to kidnap the president of Venezuela and take over the running of his country.  

You have to wonder if a more thoughtful, less self-centered person would be ruminating: “Am I irrelevant? What should I do next?” 

Moving more broadly beyond the personal to societal reckonings: It is time for Hawaiʻi to face head on that the stateʻs mental health services are horribly inadequate and getting worse. The state continues to lack adequate care services and facilities to help the severely mentally ill. The result is a hard core homeless problem the state and city seem helpless to solve and the sad possibility that more and more mentally vulnerable people will end up being shot in police standoffs.

And in the harsh light of January, something else that screams out for a reckoning is identifying the “influential state legislator” who in 2022 accepted $35,000 in a paper bag from another unnamed individual — a mysterious payment that came to light in the midst of a federal bribery investigation.

This reckoning should not be postponed or it will sink trust in government even lower at a time when Hawaiʻi residents need to believe in and support our state government, hoping it will come to the rescue with state laws and generate lawsuits to buffer us from the unlawful incursions of President Donald Trump. It is clear the traditional checks on executive power by Congress and the federal courts can no longer be counted on to stop Trumpʻs authoritarian approach to governing, his disrespect for democratic norms.

Details of this $35,000 payment to a state lawmaker were revealed publicly in a federal court document first reported by Civil Beat in March and later in a follow up letter from Acting U.S. Attorney for Hawaiʻi Kenneth Sorenson to House Speaker Nadine Nakamura.

The U.S. Attorneyʻs Office says the $35,000 was purportedly to be used by the recipient for his or her existing political campaign.

What has been stunning is that people who clearly know who took the payment have clammed up. Nobody has come forward to name the alleged wrongdoer.

In Hawaii’s close-knit society, people who could be whistleblowers have an unfortunate tendency to protect themselves by looking the other way — going along to get along — what retired University of Hawaiʻi law professor Randy Roth calls “non criminal corruption” or “willful blindness.”

Former federal deputy public defender Alexander Silvert this month sent a petition with 929 signatures of Hawaiʻi residents  to Nakamura and Senate President Ron Kouchi calling on them to convene a special investigative committee with subpoena and contempt powers to uncover the identify of the unnamed lawmaker.

The paper bag transaction was secretly recorded in 2022 by the FBI as former state Rep. Ty Cullen was acting as an informant in a federal corruption investigation.

Cullen was cooperating with federal law enforcement in hopes of getting a shorter sentence after he and Sen. J. Kalani English were arrested in 2021 for accepting bribes and gifts from Honolulu businessman Milton Choy in exchange for swaying legislation Choy wanted. Both were convicted and sent to federal prison. They have since been released.

“The legislator has to be someone very important who expects to be protected,” Silvert said in a phone call Saturday. He said he does not know who it is.

 The payoff recipient  could still be serving in the Legislature or be out of office or a working as a lobbyist,  someone with strong connections to the state.

Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez and the legislative leaders have refused to launch an investigation to uncover the name of the legislator and find out what he or she was expected to deliver for the payment. They maintain that such a broad parallel probe would interfere with the ongoing federal investigation by covering the same ground.

But Silvert says a legislative special investigation would be narrow, unlike the lengthy and sweeping federal inquiry and would require just one witness — Cullen — to identify the person who accepted the $35,000 payment and explain what special favor the payoff was supposed to buy.

This is not a time for willful ignorance. Reckonings can be painful but avoiding reality is often worse.