You never fight for a cause quite so much as you do when you are thoroughly convinced you have the right answer, and yet almost everyone is against you.  That is, everyone except you and your loyal army, which, at the end of the day, is just your crazy friends.  Your crazy family.

The man in the tye-dye shirt grinned through his black beard as he spun around and snatched the Frisbee out from behind the knee of his khaki cargo pants, If he were dressed up in a suit, He would have looked like a chemistry professor with his wire glasses, wavy, parted hair, and lanky physique.

I glanced back over to the man in the orange shirt and sweatpants as he spoke to my brother and me.  These clothes were, in my opinion, unworthy of the inspiring dignity, conviction, and love with which this man and the other had boldly listened, considered, and spoke earlier in the day.

I had met him over a year ago.  Since then, he’s still been at it, traveling all over the nation with his message of hope, justice, life, and forgiveness.  My brother and I decided we want to imitate him.  He writes us letters sometimes.  I’m honored that he even keeps in touch, praying to his God on our behalf.  But now he was standing here with us — and the other saints, too — all with the same soft breeze wandering through our hair.

On this spring evening, it was hard to believe that, just hours ago, this peaceful plaza had been a battlefield.  We were the ones who brought the battle.  We didn’t come to bring peace.  We came to stir the hearts of the ones who are afraid to have an opinion, because they have grown up with the notion that belief in a principle must depend on human authority, and can change with the wind.  That’s politics.

People will call us radicals, fanatics, disturbers of peace.  And maybe we are.  But this isn’t politics, and no matter who we are, we have equal rights to a weapon called logic, and a weapon called compassion.  You’ll never see us use these weapons to attack, but we do occasionally wield them to defend against politics.  But we’re not afraid, because when you have the truth, it doesn’t collapse.

It doesn’t matter to us who wins some argument.  The battle is really fought in the mind. The field had expanded as passersby had walked away from our home-made exhibit. And the message had spread, because they had been affected.

Who knows how we’d changed the world in a single day.  People who would stop to listen often changed their minds about us, about them — all the humans in the boat.  But the ones shunning our display — those are the ones who will be faced with the choice.

And it is a choice.

Life is a choice.  What we claim to believe must affect the way we watch after our families, our children, our humans in the boat.  As for me and my family, what we claim to believe will not be collapsed by rulers or authorities, and yet we can’t stand to let the battle remain in our minds.

Slavery can be temporary if only one realizes simple freedom was there all along, staring impossibility in the face.

Choose wisely.

The Justice for All exhibit on CSU campus, April 12, 2012.