Love your enemies: It will drive them nuts.

No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Love your enemies--it will drive them nuts. (I took this bit from Romans this morning but Paul is quoting Jesus.) It's really a brilliant concept. If you're battling someone's depravity (racism or oppression) in the court of public opinion, it's absolutely deadly to their case. If you repay evil for evil, you play into their hands. People don't feel sorry for someone who's participating in a dog fight.

I've noticed something else about being kind (not indulging the behavior, that's different) to someone who is repeatedly ugly to me though--the relationship gets better. Sure, you can't make a pit bull stop being a pit bull, but you can make her want to bite less. If you refuse to play the game, it's not any fun for them any more. Once it stops being fun, they stop playing. If you're lucky, they start seeing you as something other than a target.

It gets harder and harder to attack someone you've stopped seeing as a thing and started seeing as a person. I'm convinced that this is why Christianity became legal in the first place. The Roman public stopped seeing them as things. They refused to fight back. They continued to help people even during times of extreme plague and more of them lived through the plagues despite being exposed to it. Nero's persecution of the Christians aroused public sympathy because they didn't respond with violence. By the time of Constantine, it was politically advantageous for him to make the religion legal---and that's exactly what he did. He didn't convert right away because he was a Roman Emperor, The Way was pacifist and he had a lot more people to kill. I don't know if he had a vision or not. I just know it Jesus' vision---responding to violence with compassion--that made it happen.