Judgement and Arson

1253: 

As we swelter in a heatwave, the Bush (as we call the country regions of Australia) as usual, at this time of the year, is burning.  Houses have been lost.  It’s on the news.  [There’s been very little mention of the main tragedy concerning the majority inhabitants of the Bush, the animals, most of whom couldn’t escape and were burned to death.  They refer to it as 'stock loss', but that’s another matter.]

They say the current fires were deliberately lit.  There’s public fury about this.  And there’s due praise for the brave fire fighters risking their lives and there’s due tears for the loss of property and human lives, and justifiably so.  But these fires do other damage.  They bring out the angry judgement in us, the frustration and the excuse for harbouring violent feelings towards the arsonists.  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 the arsonist.  Here’s someone, often a juvenile, with pyromaniac tendencies, who are 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.

On being caught, they’re harshly judged by their community, who only want to see them punished severely.  The arson brings on the fury of people, who feel justified in letting it out.  And if the arsonist is caught he suffers 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 than an arsonist-lit bush fire.

That's the crime of arson, but for another equally horrendous crime there’s silence.  When something is not illegal, and I’m thinking here of the killing and eating of animals, the only thing that might help put out this particular ‘fire’ seems to be the making of judgement – the shaming of those responsible.

The activist takes on that responsibility, simply because there’s no one else doing the job on our behalf (like a politician).  We take on the role of judge, since we have no professional judge and court room to do this for us.  It seems quite justified (and essential in fact), to sound off loudest, to voice the heaviest judgement when no one else is even the slightest bit disturbed by the crime.  But still, the judgement-idea must always fail.  We form a strong opinion - the public’s for the arsonist, the vegan’s for the meat eater, but we’re doomed to failure, because we go nowhere near to understanding why the arsonist lights fires or the meat eater hurts animals.  One is in the minority, the other in the majority.  The one is usually in their youth and they’d have to be a very disturbed mind to do what they do knowingly.  The other is NOT in their youth, and they do what they do knowingly.  The meat eater is the pyromaniac’s double.  And they each need urgent help to cure them of the same urges – the urge to dominate, to violate, and to do it with not a care in the world.