Let's Pray We Can Close the Pillow Gap Before It's Too Late

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 23, 2005)

Its designers say that if it works, the pillow could one day join rifles, flak jackets and helmets as part of the basic equipment soldiers carry into conflicts. – Associated Press article on sleep-inducing pillows Danish peacekeepers are testing in the Balkans

Pat Robertson, the American TV evangelist, knocked me from despair into depression last week when he told the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, it could no longer count on God’s help. Dover citizens rejected God, Robertson said, when they voted to replace a school board that had required an introduction of so-called “Intelligent Design” into science classrooms.

“If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin,” he said. Proponents of Intelligent Design, or ID, hold that some life forms are too complex to have evolved by natural selection, as Darwin proposed, and must have been created by design.

Now, I know Robertson proved himself religiously insane long ago – he blamed the 9-11 attacks on America’s pursuit of “health, wealth, material pleasures and sexuality”; he warned Orlando, Florida, it risked God’s wrath in the form of a hurricane for holding a Gay Pride Festival; he’s said Christians and Jews are the only people fit to hold public office.

But the man is 75 years old, and it’s depressing to think that someone so old has learned and matured so little. And he’s got one million daily viewers (his network says), and his show, the 700 Club, is translated into more than 70 languages. The weight of the stupidity is too much to bear, especially nights when I lie awake formulating arguments to counter all the world’s village idiots.

I was even preparing to give up my daily news fix, ready to be done with my habitual morning apoplexy, the natural result of a mathematically trained mind meeting the illogic and inconsistency of the normal news cycle. But my outlook suddenly brightened at the news that Danish soldiers are carrying pillows into battle in the Balkans. Actually, they are not carrying them into battle; they are using the pillows -- which rid the soldiers of unpleasant thoughts and ease stress through a mixture of nature sounds and acoustical music -- to rest from peacekeeping duties.

“You will not think about what is maybe happening with your wife at home, or your children. All thoughts will disappear, images will be created – forests, beaches, mountains. And then you will fall asleep,” said Maj. Helmer T. Hansen, the battalion surgeon serving the Danish soldiers.

This is a happy development. For once the pillows are proven – and the only complaint so far seems to be that the pillows may be too thick – armies and nations will begin competing with each other to have the best rested soldiers. Technicians and specialists will work in secret laboratories to design pillows for the deepest, quickest, most satisfying sleep – for it is logical that well-rested soldiers will perform better than the sleep-deprived, grizzled veterans of earlier wars.

National efforts that would previously have gone into making better missiles and bombs will pour into pillow technology. For is it not also logical that the best and latest killing weapons will be of no use if soldiers fall asleep beside the red buttons that fire them? “Who fell asleep while our soldiers were sleeping on the watch?” will be the new question parliaments and congresses demand war-losing ministers and presidents answer.

Inevitably, too, espionage and sabotage techniques will be developed to disguise and substitute sleep-depriving pillows for an opposing army’s sleep-inducing pillows. The trick pillows will make soldiers worry about whom their wives might be sleeping with, how late their children are out and where, if anyone’s put out the dog and taken in the cat. And, yes, when both armies have been first coddled to and then disturbed from their rest, pillow fights will break out.

As an American, what worries me is that Dover, PA, aside, US educators are still contending with this movement to introduce ID and Creation Science into classrooms. In Kansas, for example, the Board of Education recently approved ID as part of its high school “science” curriculum, and similar efforts are underway in several other states. The danger is obvious -- if American students are taught that life was designed according to purpose by an intelligent being or God, they will eventually come to the conclusion that if soldiers were meant to get a better night’s sleep, their ears would be fluffier … and America will fall behind in the pillow race … to the Danes!?

I was just about to start sleeping nights again.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi

Ride Till We Find Them; Kill Them All

(First published in Bali Advertiser, November 9, 2005)

But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them … as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Deuteronomy 20:16-17

The news of the beheading of three school girls in Sulawesi sickens and terrifies in a way that hearing of thousands dead from earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami cannot. Natural disasters may inspire awe or the feeling that an angry God needs to be appeased; people may get angry at God for allowing or sending death by flood, fire, famine, and pestilence.

But unless one is personally swept up in a disaster, it doesn’t have the same numbing effect as hearing that men (or women) have taken to murder and mutilation to purify their corner of the earth – if that indeed is what is happening again in Sulawesi.

It is easy to point to religious conflict as the motivation behind the beheadings of Saturday, Oct. 29. Thousands, after all, were killed in clashes between Christians and Muslims in Sulawesi and Maluku provinces from 1999-2001, and in May, a market bombing in Tentena killed 22. One Indonesian observer (Lian Gogali on the political blog www.laksamana.net), though, says that blaming it all on religious rivalry simplifies a situation that owes as much to corruption and economic and political power struggles.

Rev. Andreas Yewangoe, Chairman of the Indonesian Communion of Churches (PGI), “dismissed speculation that religious motives were behind the murders” and called on Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to “capture the perpetrators … and unearth the real motive behind the crime,” according to an Oct. 31 article at www.adnki.com.

Din Syamsuddin, chairman of the Muslim organization Muhammadiyah, said the “incident … has nothing to do with ties between Muslims and Christians," according to the Jakarta Post.

On the other hand, it seems naïve to say, “No religion teaches us to kill our brothers and sisters,” as former Indonesian president Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid did after the girls’ murder at the end of October. Religions that have at one time or another instructed people to kill their “brothers and sisters” sometimes seem in greater supply than those that don’t. The quote from the book of Deuteronomy is just one of several places in the Christian Bible where God supposedly commands death for enemies of his people. The Koran, too, has its bloodthirsty passages allowing for or commanding the killing of unbelievers, and some primitive belief systems are built around the taking of heads. Even if a religion doesn’t itself teach people to kill their brothers and sisters, there are usually religious leaders willing to make up for God’s oversight.

In Sulawesi, whatever the motive – whether religious or racial cleansing, or the creation of chaos for some political and economic end – six men thought their goals and beliefs justified the murder of three teen girls. And the men didn’t have the decency to off themselves a la the Bali bombers in the making of their “statement,” which means there are still at least six men in Sulawesi comfortable with a leisurely beheading come a Saturday afternoon.

The disturbing thing about that, the thing that chills in a way that wind, water, and unstable earth cannot, is not how different those six men must be from us, but how similar they and we are. We are all capable of such brutality. Or, at least, we are all only a few generations removed from ancestors that had to be just as brutal to live long enough to pass on their genetic seed.

The question to ask isn’t, “Can’t we all just get along?” The real mystery is that we are getting along as well as we are. Human history is one long account of peoples and nations trying to wipe out most everyone else. Western Europeans didn’t stop killing each other by millions until the middle of last century; political ideals were behind the extermination and starvation of countless persons in Russia and China; the US has stockpiled weapons with the explosive power to destroy the earth many times over; and it’s only been sixty years since our last world-wide killing spree. Since then, we haven’t been able to get really going again, but the six men in Sulawesi are proof that our old, familiar instincts are still there.

Those six men remind us of the thin line that separates us from our “primitive” forefathers of 10,000 years ago, or even of 1940 and 1914. None of us are far free from the kind of thinking that can justify the beheading of three school girls. And if anyone thinks that understanding and tolerance of cultural differences are effective weapons against mobs intent on murder for a cause, then I’d rather someone else watch my back when the barbarians come over the gate.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi