Last week I wrote somewhat glibly about the perceived 'hell' of life in suburbia. Turns out the word was better suited to my more rural neighbours. Since I wrote that column, Victorians living beyond Melbourne's suburban sprawl have experienced hell first hand, as the worst bushfires in Australia's history charred life and land.
For me, like for many living in the suburbs, interstate or overseas, the horror was mostly vicarious. I spent much of Sunday watching helplessly the increasingly horrific news reports. I watched with dread as the body count grew with alarming rapidity. And was disturbed by revelations that at least some of the fires were deliberately lit.
At such times, grief and anger are the various faces of a pair of dice spun in mid air. The way the dice topple can be affected in one way or the other by the tone and nature of media reports and by the public statements of influential figures.
When newsreaders announced that arson was involved, it prompted the dice to topple on the side of anger. The thought of a malicious hand in this saga sickened the gut, and quickened the desire for vengeance.
Doubly so when, during a live cross on Channel Nine's Today show on Monday morning, PM Kevin Rudd said of the firebugs: 'What do you say
about anyone like that? What do you say? I don't know. There's no words
to describe it other than it's mass murder.'
The PM wasn't alone in his anger. On Sunday, a new Facebook group appeared, with the name 'Get the fuckers who lit the Victorian bush fires Feb 7th 2009'. As the days progressed and the death toll rose, such sentiment seemed prevalent: the arsonists ought to be 'burned at the stake'.
(One acquaintance of mine proposed a more imaginative form of poetic justice; 'Lock 'em up for life, but first make 'em sit and watch while you burn everything they own.')
But there is a difference between justice and vengeance. Few would dispute that the victims deserve the former. Rudd's words seem to fuel a desire for the latter. They are probably inaccurate — 'murder' entails intent to kill, whereas in all likelihood the aim of the firebugs' compulsion was property damage, and not loss of life. That is not to diminish the seriousness of the offense. But there's little to be gained by such inflamatory statements.
Of course, for me and other such armchair