I was going to write a story about a cooperative little community, or maybe a planet, that uses friendship as a currency. It would have been about a world where everyone rewards each other for their artistic and literary creations.
In the story, an adversary comes along, a character called the Sun King, or maybe just King Corona. This king shows up and buys the central park with its amphitheater and main art gallery, throws out all of the custodians, ruins the vibe, and begins a haphazard propaganda campaign that only enrages the community.
An army of robots was deployed, while the self-appointed king tried to centralize control. He didn't know it, but he had just kicked a hornets nest.
While at first it looked like doom for the little voluntary societies, a miraculous thing happened instead. The communities did what all communities do when disaster strikes; they helped each other.
The harder the bad guy tried to isolate and divide them, the tighter this great little family became.
Instead of weeping over a lost civilization, new friends remembered what their true currency was, and old friendships sparked into a formidable swirl of cooperation and voluntary gifting, whereupon they simply rebuilt their world, better than before.
Any illusion of authority that young King Corona may have conjured into his own head during this dramatic exodus of the community and their rebuilding of a new society was lost in a dense dollop of reality. With his riches, he'd never imagined that friendship was so much more valuable than his countless coinage.
It didn't matter that his acting was poor-- he thought-- he would just buy an applauding audience. It hadn't worked, as the community that he'd hoped to purchase was now gone from his kingdom.
Where had they gone?
The beings who made up the community had decided that they wouldn't wait for 'authority' to tell them what was going to happen next. They busily and immediately began creating a whole new system which worked for them instead of against them. The groups didn't wait for the hourly news so that their would-be owners could tell them what to think and do, they were occupied with starting a new earth from seed, already nurtured and watered by their very own wills.
With all of the doom and gloom in the world here in 2020, I doubted if my story would be seen as realistic. Nobody would be interested in a tale with a happy ending, not when the popular kids were all talking about death and disruption as the inevitable outcome of things.
In the old world, I used to write book reports about books that I didn't have time to write. In making a new world, I'll barely have time to write even these little book reports, since the first thing to do when making a new earth will be to make some food. I'll be out in the garden for a little while, thinking of new stories to write about.
Above images are mine. 'Rollercopters' is watercolor and ink, from 2004.