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Essay

Part Eleven — "Liar Liar Pants on Fire" (... no really)

By Garry Bassin

There's an expression in English that children use when they're playing. They say, "Liar Liar Pants On Fire!" when they think someone is lying. Last year on Christmas Day a man on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit decided to try to detonate a bomb just prior to landing. Luckily, it didn't go off, instead he set fire to his underwear and the seat he was sitting in. Not a lie, pants on fire.

Why did he wait until the end of the flight? Why didn't he set off the bomb in the bathroom where he had just spent 20+ minutes? And why in his underpants? Wow, that has got to hurt!

There are all kinds of beliefs: personal ones, religious ones, nationalistic ones. For some reason, we seem as human beings to have a hard time keeping them to ourselves. Religious zealots attack other religious zealots. On a grand scale, countries attack other countries. It seems for thousands of years all we have done is think of new and better ways to kill each other. A collective mentality that believes it is the only answer to the world's problems more often than not creates more problems than it fixes.

But it's not just organized groups. As individuals we spend a lot of time trying to convince others to be like us and not enough time using our knowledge to help the people around us, regardless of what they believe. What good could have resulted if in fact the Christmas Day underwear bomber had killed himself and hundreds of people on that flight? No one would have cared about his beliefs or his social plight. We would have just thought it was dumb and very unfortunate, not to mention annoying, now that it will take even more time to get through airport security.

Come on. It's 2010 and we need a new mantra. Enough with the selfishness that allows us not to consider the person next to us or the one on the opposite side of the planet. We are intelligent, highly capable human beings, so we at least should be able to clean the planet, and respect and help our neighbors. After that, different belief systems are fine (and actually quite necessary), until we start forcing them down each other's throats.


Shukan ST: February 5, 2010

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