THE Department of Defense will be holding new public meetings next month on the notorious firing range issue. These meetings are part of the creation of a “supplemental environmental impact statement,” or SEIS, for proposed actions regarding building firing ranges for transferred Marines. For all of you who have concerns about the buildup, in particular where the ranges may be placed, please come out to the public meetings.

Buildup proponents are already preemptively decrying the “radicals” who may show up to hijack these meetings. They invoke the specter of the last public comment period over the draft environmental impact statement, or DEIS, and how the public testimonies that were collected at these meetings were overwhelmingly negative and gave the impression that Guam didn’t love the military or the buildup. The memories of these buildup proponents are foggy at best. They recall a time when everyone loved the buildup and everyone loved America; where Guam was set to get a big fat golden ticket that would make everyone’s economic dreams come true. Given the level of rhetoric about how fantastic the buildup was, you might think it also had the ability to make the blind see and the lame walk.

But then the DEIS period came around. During that three-month period, all of the malcontents, the maladjusted of Guam seemed to worm their way out of the woodwork and stole the microphone, warping the way Guam saw itself. The silent majority of Guam cowered in fear at the fiery rhetoric of these radicals.

The mangkåduku came out, daring to remind the island that the U.S. still has so many unresolved issues it should attend to before it can expect people on Guam to support such a massive, poorly planned population and infrastructure increase to Guam. These mischief-makers even dared to mention that Guam is a small island where the military already controls 27 percent, and for it to want to increase its footprint by close to 2,000 acres seems unfair. The foaming-at-the-mouth pinheads even went so far as to talk objectively about the buildup and how it actually wasn't a golden ticket, how it might only benefit those at the top, a lot, and how everyone else might actually find it harder to get by.

For buildup proponents this period was a nightmare; it felt like everything was slipping away. In truth, the seeds of the buildup falling apart and being downsized or delayed had been there for quite a while and had little to do with local protests. The buildup was planned and proposed long before it actually came time to implement it. The health of economies changed, administrations changed, and what was once a sure thing became something people weren’t sure the U.S. or Japan could afford.

Proponents of the buildup would like for us to believe the lesson of the DEIS comment period is “mungga maåkka’ i kannai ni’ muna’boboka hao!” “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!” In other words, the buildup is being downsized and Guam has lost its chance because we were not sufficiently patriotic enough and let our juvenile “activists” make it seem like we didn’t want it enough.

This is laughable. Sen na’chalek este.

There are two basic lessons that we should have learned after this long and winding buildup road.

1. Patriotism played little to no role in this issue. If everyone on Guam had named their firstborn “buildup” and their second born “rules” and then decided to go out and get tattoos that said “I Love the Buildup,” it would have barely affected reality. Community support is nice, but it is not a deal-breaker. Perhaps if Guam was either a state of the U.S. or an independent country, our faith in the buildup would play a role. However, given Guam’s current status, love or hate things as much as you want, this buildup was decided without Guam at the table, and that has not changed.

2. The maladjusted crazies were right. The tree-hugger worried about the damage to coral reefs was right. The student worried about a lack of middle class jobs after graduating UOG was right. The poor person worried about how the buildup will cause the cost of living to go up was right. The buildup, even by the DOD study, wasn’t that great for Guam, and the DEIS comment period helped to reveal that. When proponents of the buildup complain about how people turned against the buildup two years ago, they might be decrying how we became blind to the beauty of the buildup. In truth, they are lamenting how the people have started to see.