When a gunman entered Sandy Hook elementary school and murdered 20 children and six adults after killing his mother in their home, the shock was so great you could assume that America would undergo a profound shift in consciousness.
In addiction parlance, Sandy Hook was the rock bottom moment – where things are so bad you know they can no longer continue as is. After rock bottom, there is a choice: stasis and misery or growth and transformation.
With Sandy Hook, many of us in Australia assumed that after the grief, there would be a reckoning: the National Rifle Association would lose much of its power and influence, its spokespeople and shills would become pariahs, and meaningful legislation would pass so that this tragedy wouldn’t happen again. Right? Wrong.
Since Sandy Hook, when much of the world said “never again”, 2,348 mass shootings have occurred. The number rises every day.
For America, a shift in national consciousness did occur, but powerful interests (and the politicians beholden to these interests) stopped growth and transformation. Stasis and misery followed.
From the other side of the world, many Australians were confused and appalled. How hard can it be, we tweeted, lectured and hectored. Even our conservative former prime minister John Howard did the rounds of the US late-night shows to explain how he enacted radical gun reform measures, how Australia used the painful and shocking experience of the Port Arthur massacre to change and evolve.
There was more than a hint of moral superiority in how much we liked telling Americans they must lay down their weapons, that they needed to wake up.
But soon it will be our time to look in the mirror.
This apocalyptic-seeming Australian summer is our Sandy Hook moment.
We have to seize it and change our thinking, our priorities and our politics. In doing so we can change our country, our future, and transform ourselves into global leaders on climate change.
These fires without precedent have the potential to profoundly shift the national consciousness. This summer could shake us awake – if we let it.
But if we don’t do it now, while things are raw and real, we never will.
The alternative is bleak: another lost year, another lost decade. That’s another year of willing yourself to forget that 49.7C day in Penrith, of trying to block out the pictures you saw on social media of charred animal carcasses and the ash you see falling from the sky and the image of the New Year’s Day sky that turned black at 4pm, of the people you saw on television who tried not to cry when they said their house had burnt down, but were thankful to be alive. Of the friends you had to call in the fire zone to check if they were OK.
It’s trying to forget the footage you saw of the woman who ripped off her shirt and ran into the bush to save a burning koala. Of the photo you saw of the people standing in the sea in the middle of the night, in the dark, as the fire tore down to the shore. Of the exhausted Nelligen firefighter who had seen seven houses lost that day, who collapsed on the ground – but not before he told the prime minister to “get fucked”. Of the tornadoes made of fire lifting up fire trucks weighing tonnes, of nightmarish dashcam footage of flames coursing through a fire truck with people in it, of vast fire fronts meeting up that are too big too fight (and the forests, lit up at night, look like when you’re on a plane, flying low over a metropolis). Of the man who died in Batlow of a heart attack after helping defend his friend’s home.
Surely these things are powerful and terrifying enough to change us?
What might our transformation look like? It might look like a simple acknowledgement of causation between climate change and this summer’s fires.
Transformation is recognising the facts: Australia is a climate vandal, led by wreckers. We are ranked the worst of 57 countries on climate policy.
Australia is the largest exporter of coal to the world, a global top 10 deforester and a world leader in mammal extinction.
Our carbon-loving prime minister, supported by the Murdoch media and fossil fuel industry, came into parliament carrying a lump of coal.
Climate scientists have proven time and time again, the link between carbon emissions and global heating. The ferocity of these fires was predicted.
Once this causation has been established in our minds, we can and we must demand that the government create a meaningful climate policy.
The painful lessons of this summer could be transformative, if we allow them to be. Australia – having experienced the pointy end of the climate catastrophe – could become a leader in the global fight to reduce emissions.
The alternative is stasis and misery – or even more awful (and currently unimaginable) – a worsening of the current condition, a death spiral.
When rock bottom is hit, change can happen.
Four thousand people evacuated to a beach on New Years Eve. This is rock bottom. The largest evacuation in Australia’s history. This is rock bottom. One third of the koala population on the New South Wales mid-north coast being destroyed, and the entire ecosystem ravaged. Again, rock bottom.
This is our Sandy Hook moment. We must seize it and demand an effective climate policy. Or nature will be forced to teach us her hard lessons – over and over and over again.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
