Non violent, never passive: remembering Gandhi

There will be increased occurrences and ferocity of fires and floods worldwide. In Australia we will lose much loved icons such as the Barrier Reef and Bondi Beach and suffer many more Black Saturday fires and Queensland floods.

This is violence perpetrated on a gargantuan scale, reaching ahead for generations.

Governments world wide are being accused of dereliction of duty with regard to climate change?

Our species like most animals has the primitive brain's survival mechanism of fight or flight or freeze. In the face of immediate threat this capacity to react can be life saving.

Beyond this the upper brain or neo cortex has enabled the development of spirituality, higher conscience, and civilization. It enables intentional strategic action.

Injustice can and should, enrage us; but Gandhi has shown us that the fight can be pursued, with dogged defiance, be non violent but never passive.

So remembering Gandhi on his birthday how may he inspire us?

Governments world wide are being accused of dereliction of duty with regard to climate change?

James Hansen, former head of NASA and Al Gore have advocated civil disobedience as an extreme last resort to block coal mining and export..Hansen was arrested protesting the building of the Pipeline that would carry crude coal from Canada to the US. Prominent Australians including academic Robert Manne and David Ritter CEO of Greenpeace Australia, have also backed, peaceful civil disobedience. in the face of the enormity of the calamity we are facing. They both spoke in support of six Greenpeace activists boarding a Korean ship carrying Australian coal.

Perhaps our most successful recent Australian example of peaceful civil disobedience, that occurred over thirty years ago, was the Blockade to save the Franklyn River in Tasmania. This inspiring event demonstrated that ordinary people can get involved. People of all ages and from all walks of life participated in the Blockade. I was one of the 1400 people who was arrested and spent time in a Hobart Jail. It feels like one of the better things I have done in my life

Each of us can choose to do what we can, to overcome wrongs, or otherwise become complicit, by doing nothing.

Anna Frank,at 13, has left us with a message as powerful as any left by heroic adults.