Entry 62. Messengers of nonviolence

“Guy comes to me, his liver’s shot, his wife left him, he’s broke, I think his dog might have died, too,” John Hemlock said to general laughter. “He says, ‘Why would God do this to me?’ The thing is, I said, God didn’t do anything to you, son, he’s only honoring the choices you made over the years. Your life is the product of the choices you make, moment by moment. You can hang on tight, or you can relax and turn the controls over to Jesus.”

Now, everyone knew where Johnny would be coming from, so those who chose to think about the religious themes took them seriously, and those who were not so sure took what he had to say that they could apply to their lives and left the rest to simmer. That’s what I mean when I say maybe Sirians are a special breed where this could work – most of us learned early to live and let live. We have no special need to convert other people to our way of thinking, as long as they don’t try to convert us to theirs. And in that way, John Hemlock is the perfect preacher for our planet. He does his share of converting but he doesn’t fuss for the lost souls who choose to stay lost – or those who get themselves found by other means.

My half of the talking didn’t touch on the supernatural, although once I added John’s “Love your neighbor as yourself” verbiage I guess it did have that undercurrent. I was not trying to win souls as much as minds when I said it: It simply makes sense looking at human nature that the way you treat others is reflected in the way they treat you.

“When you overthrow a violent regime violently, you only replace one violence with another,” I’d say. “If you want fundamental change, you must make fundamental changes in the way you approach the problem. A government or a society that solves its problems by killing or maiming its adversaries is not going to change minds – and changing minds is the only way to achieve the real goal: ending tyranny.”

The audiences had been growing, but they dropped off again after armed soldiers began to patrol the streets. One thing that can be said about violence is that it’s quicker, although not at all effective in the long run as we learned. Ramsey Sardonicus proved in Colorado that you can take a regime down in a hurry by ignoring it, but the people of Sirius 4 wanted to try taking the tyrants on their own terms first. The only time I resented that approach was when Lt. Joshua True tried turning my resistance to violence on its head.

Entry 63