Comfortable being uncomfortable

No public bus service on Guam as the island observes holiday in honor civil rights activist who protested discriminatory bus policy

By Vincent Akimoto

On Dec. 1, 1955, a tired Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

According to local government policy, non-white Americans were required to sit at the back of public buses and were also obligated to give up those seats to white riders if the front of the bus filled up.

Parks was in the first row of the black section when the white driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white man.

Although many news accounts portrayed Mrs. Parks as tired and old, she said, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” 

Rosa Parks courageous act of nonviolent resistance helped spark the Montgomery bus boycott, a 13-month struggle to desegregate the city’s buses.

The 26-year-old Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. organized a boycott to protest Rosa Parks’ arrest and demand the desegregation of public buses.

On Guam, there is no bus service on MLK Day, an official holiday.

The 2030 Guam Transportation Program is GovGuam’s strategy to improve public transport for our island people. The vision statement is “to provide a safe, efficient and sustainable transportation system for our residents, visitors and military personnel that will support economic diversification, resource conservation and an exceptional quality of life.”

In 2026, GovGuam is spending $2.8 million to provide public bus transport around our tiny, 30-mile-long tropical island. Unfortunately, GovGuam is spending most of that money on employee salaries and million-dollar Christmas vacations. Therefore, very little money is left to actually transport anybody around.

You see, under Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero and Speaker Frank Blas, Jr., GovGuam has repeatedly prioritized employee salaries and benefits over public service.

Ineffective public policies by the Guam Legislature and the woeful leadership of Gov. Leon Guerrero have resulted in failed public schools; an exodus of Guamanian workers and their families due to a depressed economy; and the desperate off-island migration of sick people to seek medical care that is not competently available on Guam.

Instead of wide-eyed acknowledgement of their failures, our senators and our governor find it necessary to make bald-faced excuses for their flagrant politicization of GovGuam’s $1.35 billion budget.

Instead of a new Simon Sanchez High School, a safe Guam Memorial Hospital, or reliable public bus service, Guam citizens get to watch their government become embroiled in federal corruption investigations and they get to see their underperforming, nonessential public servants repeatedly take million-dollar days off.

We voters are told to eat bitterness, suck it up, endure hardship and sacrifice so that GovGuam workers can have 22 percent pay raises.

We business workers are told that the private sector is greedy and that only GovGuam can solve all of society’s problems.

The government of Guam has broken the social contract of leadership, in which we, the people, yield individual freedom and treasure for the sake of collective security and the common good. Year after year, GovGuam politicians have taken taxes from the people and aggressively made themselves more comfortable and richer.  But the sacrifice of the Guam taxpayer has not resulted in a local government that competently delivers the American standard of basic social services, community healthcare, public education, or public safety.

Legitimate power remains firmly on the consent of the governed. GovGuam leaders serve at the pleasure of the people, but our political leaders have chosen to violently reject the value of human capital and hard work.

Martin Luther King, Jr, Mahatma Ghandi, and Nelson Mandela were all revered not so much for their wit but more for their kinetic kindness and relentless optimism in the face of pious, violent aggression.

On Guam today, our local government has aggressively shown itself to be violently averse to public service. On a holiday dedicated to freedom fighters who protested unfair public bus transport policies, GovGuam issued a statement to island bus riders that there would be no service on Martin Luther King holiday.

Instead, GovGuam employees would again get paid to stay home while needy citizens would be forced to walk miles to work and school when no other transportation is available.

GovGuam must be better than this.

In a time of chaos and cataclysmic change, our local leaders need to shape up.

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr risked their lives and suffered personally to improve their government. Their historic acts of civil disobedience forced change in a political system that was committed to maintaining the status quo.

GovGuam must change.

The primacy of GovGuam employees' comfort must end. Service for the people must be the prime directive. Public service must be the first priority. 

My humble, unblinking advice to Guam politicians is to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

  Dr. Vincent Akimoto practices Family Medicine at the American Medical Clinic. Send feedback to akimotovince@yahoo.com

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