NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I attended the SEIS Public Comment Hearings at both Okkodo High School and Father Duenas Memorial School. As someone who was there during the last DEIS Comment priod meetings and wrote about it quite a bit on my blog and later in this column, it was interesting to see the public debate over militarization in Guam be shaped this time in a war of words, ideas, fears and dreams emerging from the clashing comments. Most public debates happen through the dusting off of faded and often outdated pieces of information in peoples’ heads. Your perception of how some important issues of public substance is determined by random snippets of information you have heard, read, been told, want to believe, are afraid to admit to and so on. In each society there are always a list of things that everyone is expect to know something about, and be expected to take some position on, even if that position is that you don’t care about it or that everything sucks about it. The milita

I wrote in my Marianas Variety column today about the importance of attending the recent public comment meetings on the military buildup because of the way it can provide a more textured understanding of the issue and why people might support it or protest it. Media reports will generally simplify things so that there are two or at most three sides to an issue, and it is no different with the military buildup. This is not only problematic because of the reduction in ways of seeing an issue, but also the representatives of different stances are reduced to caricatures. You are not introduced to the contradictions, the investments, the slips of the tongue, the rambling, the things that might help you understand more clearly that person's position. For those that need some updates on the military buildup debate, I've pasted some articles here for you to read and get informed. ****************** Last DSEIS meeting held Wednesday, 21 May 2014 03:00am BY JASMINE STOLE | V

Mina'kuatro na Lisayu 12/18/13 My grandfather has a memory that would put elephants to shame. I imagine that he must have spent his youth eating elephant brains in order to develop his uncanny ability to remember what seems like every negative thing that has happened in his life. Good things fade and fizzle in his mind, they drip down his frame and never sink in, but a mistake, a slight, an insult, a lie, when someone has wronged him, those things become etched in his mind. My grandfather can recall people who didn’t pay their fares when he drove a cab for a short period after World War II. He can remember people who cheated playing volleyball before the war. His memory is filled with family scandals over land, gifts that were never reciprocated and loans that were never paid back. Part of the reason grandpa has this personality is because he was the oldest of his siblings and has felt like he has given so much to his family over the years and not