So. Badiah Sinclair. What an incredible mixture of contradictions. The heroic champion for freedom. The tyrant who was worse than the one he replaced, because he pledged that he would not be. The eloquent orator. The tongue-tied miscreant.
I love that man for where he led us. I believed he hated where he tried to take us after our triumph, but he had no faith in the alternative. When all you know is one way, it’s hard – perhaps impossible – to embrace another.
Let’s talk about the hero first – the boy senator, elected at age 19 with a wisdom beyond his years, president at 25.
My friend. One night Badi and I rode through a particularly rainy night mostly in silence while he stewed about the girl who had broken up with him because he was too intense too soon, and two years later he was Senator Sinclair. That made me a bit of a celebrity among my fellow sophomores at the University of Sirius 4 – the pacifist wacko whose best friend was the kid senator.
He shook up some of the older and more established senators with the fire of his belief in Sirian independence. It wasn’t the angry flame you might expect in someone our age, just a confident optimism that the people of Sirius 4 were best equipped to determine the course that Sirius 4 should be following. We all shared the same frustration in the intrusive, parent-like government of Earth, whose representatives seemed to believe that the descendants of space pioneers – and the thousands who were emigrating to settle on Sirius 4 every year – were somehow not ready to make grownup choices.
(We had some interesting conversations as my training as a historian began to reveal to me that this smarter-than-you attitude was not just a trait of Earth’s government regarding Sirius 4; it’s an occupational hazard common through the ages to most who choose government as a career.)
Within months (weeks, really) of his entry into the Senate, Badiah had assembled a coalition of lawmakers who pressed the governor for negotiations intended to lead to greater autonomy – and eventually independence – for Sirius 4.
In hindsight it’s pretty clear that Mommy Earth was patronizing the coalition, sitting down with pretty words and a few simple reforms that gave our legislature a comfortable illusion of progress. The governor was still an appointee of Earth with veto power and a security force as backup.
But Badiah and his colleagues believed they had Earth’s ear. They believed that would be enough to make us free someday, and without the “need” for bloodshed.
I was all for that, of course. The focus of my studies had been on people who had made a difference on history without the use of violence. In recent Earth history Ramsey Sardonicus had won independence for a small landlocked nation called Colorado with his synthesis of the teachings of King, Thoreau and Gandhi. A campaign of noncooperation succeeded in gaining Colorado’s right to secede from Texas in a bloodless revolution. It was my hope that Badiah’s coalition would be able to do the same for an entire planet.
He certainly projected the confidence that it could be done, with his youthful good looks, that big confident smile, and the persuasiveness of his call to freedom. At least he persuaded many people on Sirius 4. It wasn’t until the Simmons incident that we understood how fully he had failed to persuade Mommy Earth.
Entry 17. First casualty
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