Fire Reflections
As I reflect:
- Scott Morrison may yet be one of Australia's great anti-witnesses to the Faith, up there with Pell and others. His public faith and his Pentecostalism, his links to Hillsong, and his appalling judgment over going to Hawaii during the fires, not to mention lumps of coal in Parliament, and his scepticism and vacillation on Climate Change will all come together. People of all political persuasions and ages are beginning to rage at him. He is shaping as a scapegoat, the one who pays for the sins of the nation. John Hewson wrote recently that
Ironically, climate probably offers Morrison his best chance to show leadership, and to earn the genuine support of the “quiet Australians”. It will take honesty and courage… Morrison just needs to out this rump in his government and discipline or manage them. He would be surprised at just how much slack voters would cut him for doing so.
Not doing this could be his undoing.
- As I consider the depth of feelings in our house over one day of fire in the Hills, and just up the road, here in Adelaide, I wonder what the month of living in smoke in Sydney is doing to people… not to mention to the people in the fire zones.
- I see that Climate change is not simply a mortality reminder, not simply a reminder that I will die. It says something about the culture. If we have any compassion for people we surely see that for all our violence and other limitations as a species, what is happening here is the undoing of the best of people's desires. Despite all the greed and fear, and in its midst, this planet has been a place of people seeking to be something more, seeking to transcend mere brutishness. Most people seek to live for the good as they understand it. And it is all coming to an end. So it's not just that we all die and so there is no faux immortality via our descendants. It is also a great grief about the death and failure of the human endeavour.
- And I am startled at how, despite all my knowledge of the scapegoating mechanism, and despite all my efforts to transcend it, at how much in the last 24 hours I have caught myself transferring anger onto others. When it comes to our interpersonal relations, I suspect the fires have barely started.
Andrew Prior (2019-12-21)