Peace fires?

Taken almost from the same spot the two photos demonstrate how complex are the issues of peace.

In the morning I photographed the Peace Fire and the sky was clear; there was a tranquility that allowed my inner being to relax.

In the evening, however, the vast red sky signalled yet another round of multiple forestry burnoffs, visibly marking the death of more ancient forests and the animals and plants within the burning coupes.

The newspaper also carried an angry letter from an old union boss John Halfpenny that supported the governments forestry program by condemning a message from Gunter Grass in the ‘Future Perfect’ exhibition catalogue of which I was a part.

What to do? How does one sit besides a Peace Fire twice a day in an attempt to learn to live peacefully and yet remain committed to stopping humanities violent behaviour toward humans and towards all living beings?

Below is a letter to the editor I wrote yesterday. Am I being fair? Am I bearing witness? Or am I fuelling the fires of anger?

Dear Editor,

One hopes that as a person gets older, their life experiences mature them with wisdom, compassion and an unfailing sense of the need for a peaceful coexistence between every living being on this planet.

Instead, with John Halfpennys letter to the Mercury (April 9), I read a letter from someone whose ageing heart and mind seem to have ossified into brittle comments of half truths.

On the one hand he condemns the burning of the Dixie Chicks CDs; a paragraph later, he changes his mind on literary freedom and condemns the artist and Nobel Prize winner, Gunter Grass, because of Grass’s written plea to our government to stop its uncultured, unsustainable behaviour of clear felling.

Nowhere does Grass accuse forestry workers of book burning as Halfpenny would have us believe. The actual paragraph by Grass reads: “To this day, fire-bombs are dropped over clearings to destroy what life and vegetation remains. This is inhumane. It is part of a failed, yet still dangerous, uncultured attitude, of which burning books is but one aspect, and poisoning animals and plants but another.”

Would anyone accuse Halfpenny of despising Australian soldiers were he to write an antiwar statement about Howards involvement in Iraq? Of course not. In both cases, it is the governments immoral attitudes towards the sanctity of life that is being attacked, not the decent fellow that has to shoulder either the gun or chain saw.

He labels Gunter Grass’s writing as outrageously dishonest and irrational. In order to seek clarification, I have read Grasss and Halfpennys two statements several times and I remain confounded over why Halfpenny is so vehemently opposed to what is a decent proscription of how we, as humans, as Tasmanians, might live.

The only answer that seems to make sense is that, whereas Grass has grown into his senior years with a deepening sense of morality, Halfpenny is stuck somewhere between a street battle and senility.