The Hawaiʻi state senators’ defense of their colleague Michelle Kidani kills her with kindness. And that’s not all. Their arrogant defensiveness makes me think of the Epstein files.

The senators are defending her against a Civil Beat story indicating that Kidani is having problems associated with dementia that have affected her job.

The Epstein link is a bit of a stretch, so I will come back to it later after we look at the more straightforward reasons why the senators’ defense, including Kidani’s herself, is wrong.

Start with Sen. Lynn DeCoite who called the entire investigation unacceptable because it was critical. “Shame on them,” she said.

“You know,” she went on to say, “an attack on one is an attack on all.”

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This view does Kidani a disservice by misunderstanding aging and dementia.

Kidani’s defenders’ simplistic paternalism conceals the effects of aging in a nice-nice blanket of noble sentiments. Friends defending friends, colleagues defending colleagues, how noble. And how biased.

There’s kindness, and then there’s killing with kindness. Kindness is not the same as being nice.

Kindness isn’t simply being pleasant or agreeable. It can be those things, but true kindness goes much deeper. Under some circumstances, kindness requires openness and honesty even if that truth hurts.

In Kidani’s case, the legislators defending her are being unkind, defending her honor by avoiding the truth.

Two things are particularly hard in the early stages of dementia. One of course is the change in the person themselves and their unwillingness to recognize the change.

The other is the conflicting emotions of people close to them, which often leads to their denial. In these cases, closeness is often a bias. It interferes with seeing what’s really going on.

A man living in a retirement community, who was born and raised on the Big Island, once told me that he moved to the continent in his old age so that he didn’t have to rely on his son back home to tell him when to give up driving. He’d rather rely on the distant objectivity of a staff member.

Some legislators reacted as if inquiring about Kidani’s health was an invasion of privacy. Really? We are not talking about a purloined YouTube video of your colonoscopy.

We’re talking about an elected public official, and the issue is competence. Not what she has but what she does. Can that person perform the job competently?

As an elected public official, her condition is not simply her business or the business of the legislators. It’s the public’s business.

Remember how those carefully selected experts and politicians kept insisting that Joe Biden was OK while the polls showed that the public believed he wasn’t?

The public was clearly right in their “I can see it for myself” common sense assessment, which a large number stated in the polls. Their assessment is their business, and from a political standpoint, more relevant than a team of doctors and a cabal of political spinners.

I would sure rather trust my own judgment than the judgment of a person who believes that an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.

And it’s that attitude of precious cohesiveness that brings me to the Epstein files.

“The Epstein files are not about individual guilt or innocence,” the political scientist, Pratap B Mehta, says. “They are about the nature of collective power.”

In Kidani’s case, that is the Legislature’s collective power.

Any working group, from a family to a military unit or a legislative body, needs some cohesiveness to make it work. But cohesiveness also has downsides.

It can shield people from outside ideas and views. The group becomes an elite with know-it-all attitudes of superiority that it’s our business not yours.

Informal secret groups with secret sauce. That creates an arrogance and willingness to keep secrets.

And that’s what made me think of the Epstein files. Now, I don’t want to paint a wide swath of condemnation here. In almost every way, including of course wealth and power and sexual predation, our legislators are totally different from that gang of ultra-wealthy scuzzbag men and their hypocritical hangers on.

The people in the Epstein files make me sick. The legislators only make me worry. But those red flags at the State Capitol are enough.

The senators’ disdainful sense that they know best and need to take care of their own plus their disdain for the little people who can’t possibly know the Real Truth all smacks enough of the Epstein files to make us all worry right here in Hawaiʻi.

It’s a disservice to Kidani, a disservice to aging and a blemish on political life.