Should Bruno Mars Shine A Light On Hawaii’s Dark Side ?

They love Bruno Mars in Hawaii. In fact, so great is the public feeling for the boy Bruno, they’ve gone and named two days after him. Yet is even a demigod like Bruno Mars capable of fixing the problems that have plagued the dark underbelly of Hawaii for many a moon?

When people think of Hawaii, they tend to think of breathtaking beaches, skies of blue, golf courses of green, red roses too, and of course, Bruno Mars. Yet even paradises like Bruno Mars’s native state have their other side, and Hawaii is no exception.

The homeland of Bruno Mars is visited by eight million sun-thirsty tourists every year. President Obama loves it and so too do a lot of other rich folk. In any travel magazine you care to discard, the land which spawned Bruno Mars is waxed about in poetic terms.

Yet what they don’t tell you about the tropical paradise of world class tourist experiences from whence Bruno Mars came, is that Hawaii’s low wages coupled with the high cost of living and criminally high housing prices have created the third-largest homeless population per capita in the USA.

Over 17,000 people, mostly native Hawaiians, live on the streets and beaches of the state which has to date named two days after multi-millionaire Bruno Mars.

So great is Hawaii’s homeless problem, that only last year the governor of Hawaii announced his plan to give homeless people a one-way ticket off the islands.

It all sounds rather ripe when one considers more than 700,000 people visited Bruno Mars’s native state in June of last year and spent £1.3 billion in one month alone. In fact, it’s estimated that $2.6 million is spent every 24 hours in Hawaii.

Obviously all this cash doesn’t appear to have a trickle down effect on the poorest inhabitants of Hawaii, who live far from the tourist hot spots near toxic landfills, chemical research facilities, and pesticide test crops.

Hawaii’s most visited island, Oahu, is famed for it’s world-class golfing and plush country club. It’s not so well known for having the single largest homeless encampment in the United States. A lot of homeless people there work but can’t afford to rent a property because their wages are so dire.

It’s all a far cry from Hawaii’s most famous export, Bruno Mars, who last year earned a whopping $38 million.

Now what Bruno does with his money is his business, but if Hawaii are going to go to the trouble of naming two days after Mr Mars, the least Bruno could do is shine a little light on the side of Hawaii, no-one cares to talk much about.

The place where Bruno Mars was born not only has a big homeless problem. It has also been commercialized beyond belief at the expense of the native population.

Thanks to tourism, deforestation, urbanization, and excessive harvesting, Bruno Mars’s home of Hawaii also has the most endangered species per square mile on the planet. The bad news is, for everything including insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, snails and plants, that list is increasing every year.

In 2012 Hawaii remained one of only five states in the U.S. which had yet to establish any laws that would prevent modern slavery. Depressingly enough, according to Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery (PASS) the sex trade is a billion dollar industry in Hawaii.

All of the above have led many critics to suggest that the unique cultural heritage of Bruno Mars’s homeland has had a sledgehammer taken to it and been transformed into a third-rate Walt Disney amusement park.

In the final analysis, Bruno Mars may be good for tourism, but is tourism good for Hawaii. Mr Mars, the ball is in your court.