 We do a show on Think Tech Hawaii called Finding Our Future every other Wednesday at 1pm. We cover sustainability, progressive politics and other local issues facing our community here. And today I'm really excited we have a guest. His name is Gary Gill. He's a lifetime activist, has been a politician, worked in the state and other government agencies. So we're going to talk about tons of different things today. So thank you for being here, Gary. It's a pleasure. So I think it would be good because I've heard a lot about your story but for our audience sharing kind of your background, how you got started as a young person and what you've been through since then. Well to make a 60-year story as short as we can. What's your life story? Well I'm born and raised in Hawaii and born into a politically active family. My father was one of the organizers of the Democratic Party in the 50s. He's a labor attorney by trade. He was elected to the territorial house and to the U.S. Congress and served as lieutenant governor, ran for governor twice and this is all when I was growing up. So the whole issue of running for office and being involved politically and fighting for progressive causes or leading the liberal wing of the Democratic Party or whatever you choose to call it at the time was just part of my upbringing. So doing things political, engaging in island politics and running for office myself just between second nature. Throughout my early years, passing out flyers from my dad on Fort Street since I was four years old pretty much, all the way through more community-based activism through high school. It was my time growing up, coming of age, was during the O'Lavio Hanna stop the bombing campaign. I was involved in that kind of things, anti-nuclear, international issues like opposing American intervention in the third world and the whole contra issues and the foreign debacles of American foreign policy. Also I got involved in the labor movement. I was a union shop steward in the hotel workers union. I represented about 250 or so mostly working women in the housekeeping department at Sheraton Waikiki. I did that for a better part of eight years, ran for office, got elected to the city council, served as council chair, ran for mayor. I was mayor. Did you know that? No. We're going to revise history a little bit. Do it. Yeah. You can do that. I would have been better, I think. But then I served in state administration as the director of environmental quality control, as the deputy director for environmental health. I've also done non-profit work with the Planet Foundation, Kokua Kalihi Valley, had a role with Ohio in opening up Waimea Valley under their non-profit. And since the EGAY administration, I have been officially retired from state government, but doing consultant and volunteer work and most recently working, doing environmental conservation work in the Waianais on 1600 acres that my family has Kuliana over to restore the native forest and prevent degradation from wildfires and pigs and things like that. That's where I am. Wait, summary. That wasn't going to take too long. That was pretty good. Yeah. I guess I'm wondering what your perspective on politics today is. I mean, I'm 27 and I feel like there's been so much that happened just in my lifetime so far. So what is your perspective on it, given that you've been through so much, both in Hawai'i but also nationally? Well, certainly there's never been a more important time to get involved. There's never been greater threat to our democratic institutions than we see now. And I think that threat is coming from two ways, basically, not to focus entirely on our current president, but certainly the high-profile reversals of basic institutions of democracy and safeguards of public health and of fairness are reason enough to motivate people to start to pay attention and to get involved because the threat is real. The existential threat by climate change and just the environmental degradation that we are witnessing is another big motivator. But I think what we're fighting is disengagement. And I've seen this throughout my entire life, even working in a union setting where my work on behalf of the people in the housekeeping department affects them directly. Are you going to have a medical plan? How much are you going to get paid? Trying to get people engaged in even those issues that clearly affect their daily lives has been a struggle because folks are busy. They have other things. They have distractions. Now everybody's on their phones. They don't necessarily take the time, as they used to, to be involved in anything from the PTA to their own issues in their workplace. And it's popular to be disengaged, like nothing I do will make a difference. But that will take you until you have no choice and you will have to get engaged. So better start early. Yeah. So what is your feeling? Because I grew up with very little technology and then growing up it became like, you know, everyone started to have cell phones when I was in middle school and high school. So I kind of have both worlds, like growing up playing with no technology outside all day. And then being someone who is semi-addicted to my phone as most people are today. So like I get both. And I also know that technology, what part of technology's intent was to free up people to engage or to do other things that were more fulfilling or meaningful or impactful in society. But it seems like it's done both in some ways, like in some ways it has really helped and in some ways it's been very distracting. And you grew up in a time, you know, fighting the nuclear arms race and things like that in your generation that, you know, you didn't have social media to blast things out to millions of people in a moment. You know, everything was much slower, snail mail type things. So yeah, how do you kind of like, how would you describe how you feel about where we are today with technology and how that helps or hurts us? It's a tough question and I don't know if an old dinosaur like me is the right one to answer the question. But, you know, I have a cell phone in my pocket. I fond of telling people that smartphones make you stupid because they really do. You don't, you don't have to plan anything anymore. I look at my kids who are your age or younger and it's like, they're frustrated because nobody will commit to anything. It's like, let's go to the beach on Saturday and they're like, oh well, we'll see, right? Because something better might come up between now and Saturday that they want to come. So I think we're dealing with the same basic problem of engagement. We just have different tools that allow it to happen a lot more quickly. When I was organizing as a hotel worker, I had a printing press in my bedroom. I run mimeographs, newsletters, you know, we had, we had it all set. It was great fun, best job I've ever had of all these things. You know, I had one of the hotel worker maids was our, our poet and our, our three-dot columnist and the pool attendant was, drew my political cartoons because he was a great artist and we had all kinds of people engaging and I would type it up or have friends type it up and I'd mimeograph it out and I'd pass out these flyers and that was the high tech of the day, right? To get the, the word out on my own mimeograph machine to organize people by passing out a flyer. And I don't think anybody does that anymore. I don't even know if you can get a mimeograph machine. No, I don't even know what that is, really. Yeah, okay. So, but it was actually getting the word out and, and building an organization around the written word and communicating to people through that medium, which I think is still strong and useful. I read the newspaper in paper form every morning and I think it's important. But the, the tools that we have now are just on an entirely different scale and I think it, it can be and, and has been a real strong force for democracy. If you want to like protest, just pick your protest, Hong Kong or wherever it's going on today, people can connect and in a day a million people are in the streets. Okay, that was not really possible before. It would take much longer than that. So, in a way it can speed up that, that interaction or that coordination of that political involvement but it's not a substitute for the hard work that it takes to really organize folks. Hiling people into the street is one thing. Actually following through and making something good happen afterwards takes organization. Oh, totally. And, and that's where I'm fond of telling people who ask for it my advice who come out of kind of an activism tradition or they've been engaged politically because whatever it is, TMT or, you know, wage issues or whatever they're in front of the legislature for, basically organizing a protest is easy. It's easy. You call your friends, you're all pissed off, you go in the street and then you go home. Actually organizing governance, that's hard. Okay, developing the systems where decisions are made fairly, where laws are passed equitably, where, you know, where change happens incrementally. These are things that take a lifetime commitment, not like text you on the phone, see you on the street, let's catch, you know, dinner at zippies afterwards. Yeah, never think about it again. Well, what's the dynamic, would you say? So, you shared a photo of the Styrofoam band or plastic Styrofoam band. They tried to pass in 89. Yes, when I was on the city council. Because I've been doing this since I'm like, I was in college for like seven years. And we always say, everyone I know that I work with right now on this issue, we say, we've been trying to do this for over 10 years, but you're telling me that this has been the 30 year. Yeah, there's nothing new here. So what is the dynamic? I know sometimes things like it took 40 years for us to like band smoking, right, in many public places. But where is patience like helpful with issues or, you know, where do we need to, you know, organize better and faster and stronger to demand faster change? Because I don't think we don't have 30 years for a lot of the issues we're facing today. It's true, there are many critical issues dealing with climate change and retreat from the coastline and things. This problem is in front of us right now. And it is, it's frustrating for anybody who is thoughtful and engaged and has a life commitment to making a difference. Because rarely does dramatic change happen quickly and sustainably, right? And so I guess the first thing is to adjust your expectations. A lot of people, especially when you're young, think, oh, here's a problem, here's a solution, just do it and everything will change, right? It doesn't really work that way for most things. There are times where change happens dramatically, but still it's a struggle to implement long term. So you have to be of the mindset that this is not a one-time deal. This is a lifetime quest. So if I look at my own life over the past 60 years, I've done everything from campaign for my father to campaign for myself to organize demonstrations, to, you know, working through the nonprofit. I've been in the community, I've been in politics, running, you know, making laws, and I've been in administration, actually implementing laws. And I can look back and say, wow, things really have changed, like for example, the bottle bill, right? You know how long people worked to try and get a 5 cent returnable deposit on beverage containers like since the 1960s? Give us a reality check, yeah. And it wasn't until things came together when I was deputy director for environmental health under the Cayetano administration where the city administration was frustrated, their recycling coordinator, which was a position, by the way, I established when I was on the city council with the support of the members of the council. We imposed that position on the FASI administration. So they're getting all upset, you know, it's really hard to do recycling. I said, you know, you guys really want to do a bottle bill? Because I mean, we can, but it's going to be a lot of work. It took us two years to get it passed, right? But that was just that two years. It had been decades before when people had proposed it, and it never even got a hearing at the legislature. So I look back now and say, well, what is different in my career, in terms of environmental management, solid waste management things? Well, the bottle bill is a dramatic difference. We're the most recent and the only time in the past 20 years of the state actually imposed the bottle bill. And there's a lot of fixes that need to be done on it. It shouldn't be five cents. It should be probably 10 or 15 or 20 to make it actually functional. And the legislature's back not even paying attention to it, you know? So you take these issues incrementally past something dramatic, but it's still a lifetime of commitment. You haven't solved the solid waste problem just because people are collecting five cents on their aluminum cans and plastic bottles. It was a step in the right direction. So, you know, is it frustrating? Sure. Government is frustrating. Governance in a democracy is designed to be frustrating. The founders of this country figured like, well, having one king who tells everybody what to do is kind of dangerous. So let's take that power, give some to the administration, some to the house, some to the Senate, some to the judiciary. It's like you mix it all up there and then it takes a long time for things to happen. But when they do happen, they happen better. That's the faith in a democratic process. Right. If it's working well. Yeah. When you're engaged. So you can, you know, the basis of it is democracy works. Democracy is people power, right? So the people, if they don't assert power, somebody else will. Right. Totally. And those are going to be typically the rich and the elite who can design the system to work for themselves. Exactly. And they will if the rest of us are sleeping and let them do it. Well, that's a great note for us to go on break. And we will come back in a minute and talk more about all these fun issues in Hawai'i and politics abroad. Okay. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my book, which is also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success, and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person, and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go beyond the lines on Think Tech Hawai'i. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Winston Welch, host of Out and About. It's a show that we have every other Monday on Think Tech Live here. We explore a variety of topics that are really interesting. We have more organizations, events, and the people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. We've got some amazing guests on here, like all the shows at Think Tech, so if you want to catch up on stuff, tune into my show every other Monday and other shows here on Think Tech Live. It's a great place to learn about stuff, to be informed, and if you have some ideas, come on my show. Let's talk about it. See you later. And Aloha. Thank you for joining us. This is Finding Our Future on Think Tech Hawai'i. We're here every other Wednesday at 1 p.m. My name is Durasian. I'm the host for the show. And we have Gary Gill here, has been in the Honolulu City Council as a chair, worked in government agencies, and also as a grassroots organizer in the community over the span of his life. So thank you so much for all the work that you've done. I know it's a lot of commitment. Sometimes it's a lot of sacrifice. And we were kind of talking about, you know, politics and what patients and how things take a long time. And this is something that I think about a lot as an advocate and activist, you know, like feeling very impatient, which I think is common for young people. Like, why can't we do this faster? Things are so urgent, which I think is kind of the, you know, the importance of having a new generation come up and demand things that they feel are urgent for their time. But I also noticed that coming from kind of my non-profit introduction was in LA, where they were really well organized there. And we were doing stuff on immigrant rights, helping families not get deported, helping people get citizenship, passing bills at the federal level. And so when I moved to Hawaii, I've kind of felt since then nine years ago that that skill is not really that powerful here, except maybe in the labor movement in Hawaii. So I want to know your thoughts on grassroots organizing as a skill set that non-profits have or don't have, how you can cultivate that, which ones are good at it, and how we can maybe improve upon that. Well, it's interesting that you, and it's good that you bring this mainland experience to Hawaii. My friends, when I was younger than you and trying to organize people, one of my friends referred to the University of Hawaii as the hotbed of apathy. I still like that. And I don't think that's changed. And part of that is sort of the tropical malaise that we have. It's so nice on the beach. Yeah, let's go to the beach. Let's do things like that. And part of it is we take for granted in Hawaii the grassroots organizing that has been done by previous generations. Like when my parents were organizing the Democratic Party in Hawaii in the 50s, which now if you realize is like the dominant party of virtually everybody in the House and Senate is a Democrat, the governor is a Democrat. Well, that didn't happen just because, it happened because people were knocking on doors, taking names, creating, this is before there were databases and computers. So the database was a shoebox with file cards with people's names in alphabetical order. And little notes on it, those kinds of things. So that's how it was done. We have inherited that work. And for a generation or more, we've kind of like kicked back and said, well, there's no work left to be done. You know, life is easy now. But it's really not. One example of grassroots organizing that was really successful was the Sandy Beach Initiative. This is when I was just on the city council in the late 1980s. And there was a proposal for development of houses along Sandy Beach, along the coastline there. And people became more and more opposed to it. And they petitioned the city council, but the city council approved it anyway. So then the community went out and did a petition drive to put the issue on the ballot. And it went on the ballot, and the voters voted to save Sandy Beach. This didn't happen because people thought about it, or they were enraged, or they called their congressmen. They went out knocking on doors and collecting signatures across the island in order to make this happen. And eventually, a long story short, but the Supreme Court threw out the people's initiative and said, you don't have a right to save Sandy Beach. And the city council then had to take the action that they should have from the beginning and change the zoning. And subsequently, the whole Kaivi coastline will never see more development than it has today because of that community activism and the grassroots organizing that took place. And we'll still see that. It's manifested today in the Hawaii Kai Hui and the work that they're doing has carried forth. And even Sandy Beach wasn't the beginning of it. A Sandy Beach initiative was part of the whole Save Queens Beach initiative that happened 15 years before. So this activism or the involvement in community organizing is never wasted. No political activity is ever wasted. It leads to something else. It builds on itself. There's no more important thing that people can do to leave a positive mark on this place that we love than to be engaged in whatever element of community is attractive to you. I don't care if it's the Boy Scouts or the PTA or whatever, but making a difference and being engaged is going to be something that the next generation benefits from. Yeah. Can you talk about... So there's this issue of power. And so there's a power in the people I strongly believe in that I've seen that work. And then I would say the sentiment of my generation and maybe most progressive people right now is that although we have power, it's been co-opted more than in the past where corporations have all of this power to influence elections, influence policy. The city council chairman, Ernie Martin, the previous one just took a job as a lawyer for a development that he was protecting while he was in office. So that kind of revolving door is very disheartening for people my age and probably a lot of other people. And so can you talk about the dynamics of power and how much we need to change power structure versus just organize well? I mean, I know it's both, but... Well, the purpose of organizing is to affect that distribution of power. I don't think anybody thinks it's success. Oh, we held a rally. We made a lot of noise. That was good. We're done. See you later. I mean, it doesn't achieve it. So to me, it's interesting that you put it in those broad terms of who has power because in a democracy, the people are supposed to have power. But in a democracy, when the people don't influence that power directly, someone else will. There's this pile of things. Let's put a pile on this table and say there's like 100 blocks here. And each one is one-one-hundredth of the power that's in the community. If you don't take that and exercise it, somebody else will take three or four of them, right? Oh, yeah. Or ten, right? So and who tends to do that, who has the resources to manipulate government are large companies with money or to some extent, you can say, well, the trade unions have certain power that they have because of the... They've organized collectively to a certain cause and they can put people in the streets to campaign for elected officials. So they have a piece of power. It's not like it's all on one side and not the other, but it won't be in your side unless you're out there picking it and putting it in your pocket and organizing to take some of that power as a community or as an individual, as a voter. So everybody has one vote, right? But if you don't vote, you've just given your power to somebody else. Yeah, I guess I want to know because I think that organizing around shifting that power is really important right now because I think that's a foundational thing to passing anything and changing anything we want to see. So what do you see as a foundational policy or regulatory change we can advocate for that would take big money out of politics? Well, I know a lot of countries have and I just don't know exactly what they've done. Yeah, and that's been one of the folks of my political career that how to take money out of politics, right? And some people have addressed this by saying, well, we should have term limits, right? So that politicians can only be in so long, which is really to me cynical. It means like if you're a politician, you're only good for four, eight years before you sell out and then have to thrive. But imagine, you know, to me I say that's not really appropriate. That's like cleaning house by throwing out your antiques. Sometimes there are some really good people in there, right? And so it shouldn't be that you expire as a politician and you're no good anymore. It should be that young people, people without money and resources ought to have a better ability to compete. And that means in part taking money out of politics. What it also could be, I have a bunch of ideas on this, but for example, go to the legislature now, how many hotel workers, how many maids, how many bartenders are, no, they can't, because they can't afford to, right? Who can be a legislator is who can take off from work or is independently employed or is supported by somebody, an insurance company, a bank, a law firm or something. And then they can actually become a leader in the legislature to make rules. So why don't we treat candidates for public office the same way we treat members of the National Guard? Yeah, you don't have to quit your job, right? You have not just a right. You have a responsibility to serve in government and we together ought to support you in your employment. Yeah, a benefit. We ought to pay you at least as much as a legislator as you were making in your other job and give you a guarantee right to go back to your job when you're done in the legislature. Yeah, I like that. There's lots of things that we could do like that to increase public engagement and involvement. It's difficult in the United States because of our Supreme Court. And it's basically ruled that money is free speech and so you can't limit free speech, therefore you can't limit money. I think it's bogus. I think it's really harmful to the political process. But there's a long list of things that we could do to encourage new people running for office. When my dad was first elected, it was a multi-member district. He came in third and he still got to serve in the territorial house. We've changed that now and made basically increasing the power and influence and the electability of the incumbents and our current system discourages. It's really hard to beat somebody who's in there already. And we as a society need to deal with that because it's really discouraging. It's not encouraging. It would probably do better if we just elected our legislature randomly. We just pick a number and say, hey, Dorei, number 463. Your turn. Your turn. You got to do it like jury duty. Like jury duty. I like that. It's a good note to end on. I think democratizing our democracy makes a lot of sense. So thank you for all of your insight. And it's really good to have your insight on the show and for our generation and just the public because you have such a wealth of experience and knowledge that a lot of people have an experience and are probably curious about. So thank you. Last word is whatever you do may feel like it's insignificant but it's really important that you do it. And in my life, when people ask me all the crazy things I've done, it really boils down to I want to work with good people and I want to get good things done. And at the end of the day, whether that's something big or small, it might be seemingly insignificant in the long run but it's been very important. It's been a great ride and I'm not done yet. Exactly. I hope not. Thanks, Gary. My pleasure. Awesome. So this is our show every other Wednesday, Finding Our Future, talking about progressive politics, sustainability and other issues in Hawaii. So join us every other Wednesday at 1 p.m. Thank you.