Paris is burning. Hawaiʻi has the tools to quell the fire: Deferred maintenance.

On French streets, crowds of close to half a million people have been protesting and rioting for weeks.

Stand in solidarity and learn from us, French President Emmanuel Macron, and your barricades shall remain un-stormed.

In return for your gift of the Statue of Liberty, here is our blueprint for controlling the masses.

Destroy the places where people like to crowd. Let them come but make things so pathetic that they won’t stay. Send them home with the “promise” that they will be able to return.

Here are three crowd-control examples from your friends in the Pacific: A stadium, a playground and a convention center.

Shut It So They Can Never Come: The Stadium

Aloha Stadium was broken from the start. Deferred maintenance made it worse. Down and down the place went until it was suddenly shut for good.

There couldn’t be a more effective example of crowd control. That is the equivalent of taking half a million French protesters off the streets. 

SUCCESS!

• No more crowds of cars storming the parking-lot gates. 
• No tailgaters with their hibachi smoke triggering visions of antifa’s bonfires.
• No dangerous standoffs such as the Brigham Young-UH football games with their chants: “Our Mormon faith is stronger than yours!” “Defense, defense. Keep them from the Promised Land!”
• No more, most of all, high school marching band festivals. All those impressionable youth in militaristic uniforms, banding together, egging each other on. A powder keg.

Tooting turns into looting.

Anticipating the masses’ discontent, the state got UH to build a “temporary” stadium holding about as many people as a baby luau or a bar mitzvah reception.

This year’s homecoming crowd there was less than 12,000, about one-third of a really good Aloha football crowd. 

That’s equal to taking 300,000 protestors off French streets. 

Not the final answer, but a good start, sir. Now you need to learn a skill that you’re not good at, but Hawai‘i has mastered:

The Promise: 

A big new stadium will open real soon. Please stand by. 

And our citizens, like sheep, do.

Let ‘Em Come To Our So-So Playgrounds

Parks are gathering places. That’s why they pose so much danger. Too much like the streets of France. We all know that troublemakers often gather at parks to begin their protests. Playgrounds are cauldrons.

Yet the masses crave them.

So, if you have to have parks, but fear the masses, you need a plan like ours. Create parks but make them as uncomfortable as possible. 

So that people are free — we are the land of the free — to use them if they can stand the pain, boredom and putrid toilets. 

Mr. President, let us present Oʻahu’s playgrounds! 

Parents complain that there are too few bathrooms. The playground equipment is broken, boring and out of date. The playgrounds are too hot.  

Few Oʻahu playgrounds even have swings. A parks official once told me swings were unsafe.

(Warning: the Wailupe Soccer Park in ‘Aina Haina has swings. Near the restrooms. East Oʻahu, do you know where your children are?)

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Parents say that if they come at all, they can only stand to remain for a short time.

In playground quality, Oʻahu ranks 86^th out of 99.

SUCCESS!

According to the Civil Beat report, playgrounds are “sparsely used.”

All this carefully lubricated by the sly democracy of The Promise.

Back in your country’s day, sir, your queen, Marie Antoinette, responding to mass riots, said, “Let them eat cake!” 

Not too subtle. Her comment royally pissed off the public and put them in a revolutionary mode.

Definitely inferior crowd control. 

Compare that to the recent words of Oʻahu Parks Director Laura Thielen.

“I would love to get back to more swings.”  

Not as royal, but more a part of Hawaiʻi’s successful “make me a promise” tradition. 

New equipment, as you may have guessed by now, is supposed to be on the way.

Au Revoir Convention Center! For How Long?

When it comes to keeping crowds away, Hawai‘i’s Convention Center is our most impregnable fortress. 

A more appropriate name would be the Prevention Center because it has kept so many people away. 

In fact, it has already kept thousands of people away, close to 38,000 alone this coming year because the big, elegant-looking — but only from the outside –dump is closed. 

Or we could call it the Lack of Attention Center — because of its history of deferred maintenance, which makes Aloha Stadium look like the Bastille.

Water seepage from the get-go, never fixed, seepage all the way down like your upstairs neighbor’s leaky toilet except when you call a plumber, she shows up and fixes it.

And much more. Such as — the roof may have been built wrong in the first place.

Closed completely for at least a year, more almost for sure. No reason to rule out the chance it may never operate again. You think that couldn’t happen? What’s your cave’s address?

Therefore, crowd-control-wise the convention center enter has been a …

SUCCESS!

• No more crowds holding up traffic as they slow-walk across Atkinson Drive on their way to California Pizza Kitchen.
• No more gathering of radical fringe groups such as dentists, Rotarians and Hawaiian cultural practitioners, all with their crazy ideas and revolutionary scheming. Worse yet, many are bikini oglers.
• Much less jostling in Waikīkī, giving hope that Kalākaua Avenue will be as easy to drive on as it was during Covid-19 and that Waikīkī’s beaches will become as pristine as they were in the days before the missionaries came carrying Bibles and plans for leasehold.

And every year, thousands of people who would have come, won’t. 

Let them eat cake.