Alright. I know things lately have been doom-and-gloom. Look, the Obama administration just hasn't really given me much to feel all warm and fuzzy about. But in efforts to leave you with a good taste in your mouth for this Easter weekend, I'll tell you a quick story.
You can find the whole thing on CNN, but there is a state park on Hawaii's Kauai island. And this Polihale State Park has been closed since December after suffering severe flooding. In fact, the flooding was so bad that it destroyed an access road to the park. So even if you wanted to get to the Polihale State Park, you couldn't.
Local residents and business owners started to get nervous. Months went by and our wonderful, all-knowing, all-powerful government did not come to the rescue. The state Department of Land and Natural Resources estimated that it would cost $4 million to fix the damages, including the access road to the park. They also said it would take two years before it would be fixed. And that was if .. in these economic times .. there was money in the budget to do so.
So rather than sit around and wait for the government to do something, the people of Kauai came together and did the repairs themselves. It only took them eight days to finish all the repairs. Eight days .. compared to two years. And it didn't cost the taxpayers a dime.
One volunteer said, "We can wait around for the state or federal government to make this move, or we can go out and do our part ... Just like everyone's sitting around waiting for a stimulus check, we were waiting for this but decided we couldn't wait anymore."
Good for them!
The truly amazing of this story is that the government didn't step in and prevent these people from handling the situation themselves.