Editing Journal of an Alien Diplomat (section)

===Entry Twenty three===
Eleven Lunar cycles, just over three hundred local days, have passed since I arrived. The humans have given up pressing for FTL drive technology completely now, seeing that it will get them nowhere. We have addressed the humans directly, without a buffer of diplomats at the UN Headquarters, or through proxies like the ambassador. We spoke on their interplanetary data network, using their admittedly superior instantaneous broadcaster. The human ambassador has recovered quickly from the shock we gave him, much to his credit. It was, in fact, he who suggested that we address the people directly. He told us people would react best if we broke down our speech to the simplest possible elements, explaining why we made each decision. I thought that that would be interpreted as an insult, but he assured me that if there was one thing that humans resented in unison, it was having people talk as if everybody in the audience understood exactly what was going on. So we told them what the ambassador had told them already: that we were representatives of a large confederacy of species who agreed to mutual defense in the case of extra-galactic invasion (constantly invoked), refusal of FTL drive technology to those who did not already have it (blessedly a rare concern), and integrating new species into the galactic community (humanity was one of less than a dozen). The people of Earth were then permitted to ask questions of us directly, screened by a human diplomatic team on Earth and sent up to us. They ranged from the banal (what’s your homeworld called in English?) to the probing (from what stems your desire to keep us from FTL?) to the disturbing (do your people ever invade others?). I wonder what use it could do, but the human ambassador seemed to think it was a success.