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Wake up, Honolulu, you’ve gone numb.

Bombarded with all manner of mayhem, criminal behavior and violence, you — the good, sun-warmed, civic-minded people of this island city — no longer get up in arms when evil sneaks up in the night and douses an innocent young woman with acid.

Not that there was no reaction. There was, but it amounted to a collective heavy sigh followed by a sad shrug.

News outlets have reported on , detailing how a , was accosted on the street mauka of Ala Moana Center just after 9 p.m. by a man carrying a malevolent impulse and a container of highly caustic liquid.

He poured the acid over her, instantly dissolving the fabric of her clothes. The skin on her face, arms and feet, everywhere the wetness fell, was burned. He did this horrific damage to an innocent young woman and then walked off into the night like la-dee-dah, on to the next thing.

Reporters have followed , through his court appearances. People have water-cooler-chatted about the crime like, “Sad, yeah?” and “The crime in this town is really getting terrible.”

No. It’s not getting terrible. Terrible was the good old days when people just got mugged or old ladies were pushed down by purse snatchers. It’s beyond terrible now. It has been unacceptable for years.

Honolulu is not safe, yet no one is taking to the streets and demanding anything different. No one is lining up along the freeway holding signs. No one is holding a vigil outside HPD and chanting, “Oh hell no! Not on our island!” No one is demonstrating at the State Capitol demanding change.

Of course, citizens can no longer just walk into the Capitol building to demand anything. Now the Legislature is boarded off with a plywood perimeter, the entrance guarded by metal detectors because Honolulu is so dangerous that lawmakers can’t be accessible to the public.

We’ve gone so numb that we believe nothing can be done. People get arrested and that stops nothing.

Last year, we lost a McKinley High School student, a girl just walking to school, run down by  who was just left free to do his terrible thing on our roads.

In 2022, a woman was beaten to death outside the Kapolei Police Station by a man arrested for being too violent in his halfway house who was then set free to commit murder just a few feet away from the police station’s front door.

I can keep going on this list. I know you can, too.

The individual accused of committing the acid attack had a long list of police citations for homelessness and drug crimes. When cops saw surveillance video of the attack, they recognized him as one of their regulars. Imagine having to deal with a guy like that every single day of your job. Imagine having to deal with a whole city of guys like that, a whole island.

Let the acid attack on the young Chinese teacher be the nadir, the lowest point before citizens started taking Honolulu back.

This false rebranding of Honolulu’s hard-core homeless as fully functioning members of society who have a constitutional right to sleep in doorways and poop on sidewalks is helping no one. We have to see the problem for what it is. It’s not about civil rights. It’s about decent living, compassionate care and safety of the community. It isn’t right to leave people who are so gravely disabled and/or a danger to society out on the streets to fend for themselves or prey on others. It’s not civilized.

We’re not taking care of people who have mental illness by letting them loose and giving them an occasional sandwich. They need inpatient care and supervision.

We did not take care of Danying Zhang. We didn’t take care of her attacker, either.

We have to come back from that. We can’t keep shaking our heads and asking how bad it can get. This has to be rock bottom. It has to get better.