Judgement and arson

As we swelter in a heatwave the bush, as usual at this time of the year, is burning. Houses have been lost, it’s on the news. No mention of the inhabitants of the bush most of whom couldn’t escape and were burned to death, but that’s another matter. They say the current fires were deliberately lit. There’s public fury about this, about the brave fire fighters risking their lives and the loss of property, and justifiably so. But these fires bring out the angry judgement in us, the frustration and the excuse for harbouring violent feelings towards the arsonist. We’re proud to feel so strongly, in defence of the victims of the arson. But we’re inconsistent with our strong feelings.
In a hot dry country like Australia, where bush fires are common, there is no other person so detested as an arsonist. Here’s someone, often a juvenile, with a pyromaniac tendency. They’re neither safe from their own impulses nor from the fiercest judgement of other people. Here’s someone seeking a kind of recognition, but in a very destructive way, perhaps not fully realising the risks they’re taking, by setting a fire and causing so many deaths, and on being caught they are harshly judged by their community who only want to see them punished severely. The arson draws the fury of people who feel justified in letting it out, and if the arsonist is caught they suffer from public shaming plus the sentence passed down by a professional judge. Nothing shows better how foolish the initial act of arson is and nothing shows up the public thirst for vengeance when it is perpetrated.
But for another equally horrendous crime there is silence. When something is not illegal, and I’m thinking here of the killing and eating of animals, the only thing that might help to put a stop to the destruction is an animal activist who is making a judgement, this time from the morally outraged position, intent on shaming those involved. The activist takes on that responsibility simply because there is no one else to judge this, no professional judge or law to do it for them. It seems quite justified and essential in fact, to voice the heaviest judgement when no one else seems disturbed by the crime. But still the judgement idea must always fail, because at first glance it seems okay (to have formed a strong opinion - the public’s for the arsonist, the vegan’s for the meat eater) but they’re each doomed to failure because they go nowhere near to understanding why the arsonist lights fires or the meat eater is willing to make animals suffer for their own satisfaction. The meat eater is the pyromaniac’s double. And they each need urgent help to cure them of the same urges, to dominate, to violate and to do it all with not a care in the world.