Drabble 166 – Hagiocracy

Sometimes the appeal of fiction is imagining things as we hope they will be someday. Utopian fiction has never really done it for me; without a series of clear steps for how to get from here to there, I just don’t find idealized visions of the future all that interesting.

I’m also notoriously uninterested in apocalyptic stories. I don’t need assurance that the world is on fire; that’s life in 2019, baby.

I like a middle ground. Stories about people who see that things are terrible and do something about it. Not just surviving, though that, too, is doing something (sorry, The Road didn’t do it for me and never will), but gritting their teeth and bloodying their knuckles and planting a tree in a desolate place, returning every day to water it despite it showing no sign of growth. This is what gets me, not the threat of eternal despair or the dangling carrot of someone else solving the problem. Let me get my hands dirty. Let us all get our hands dirty.

Anyway, here’s a drabble.

HAGIOCRACY

(n.) from Latin hagios for “saint” or “holy” and Greek krát for “rule”

A government comprised of saints.

It’s hard to maintain a government free of sin. Few peoples’ hearts are lighter than the feather of truth, and fewer still are those willing to seek public office. Even fewer are those who seek can keep their hearts lighter than the feather of truth once elected. As they say, power corrupts.

But it does work, in a sense. The turnover rate is abysmal, but how can you steal from a neighbor when you’ll be judged by the woman who grew life-giving fruit or the man who can speak flowers into blooming? The saints grow worse, the people grow holier.