21 December

I'm in the middle of the bushfires with many others. The same patterns are recurring though - we post lots of powerful pictures, we thank the firefighters for their genuinely superhuman efforts, we get that nice sense of community that all disasters produce etc. We sentimentalise it, it becomes this big warm collective orgy of greeting card sentiment, of anger through to fear, awe, and arms around each other. And then - the fires will go out, and nothing will change. That's the danger. Unless we use these experiences to change how we actually think, they will keep happening, and they'll get even worse. Already this time firefighters are mostly powerless to do anything, because we didn't think hard enough all the previous times.