Microstory 1482: President From Earth

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Things were pretty bad after the Deathspring sent a bunch of people from Earth to Durus. The Durune didn’t want them there, and the Earthans didn’t want to be there. Two seemingly contradictory things were happening at the same time, which sort of fed into each other. Durus was trying to get rid of all the misogynistic laws of the past, and become a more just society, but they were struggling to accomplish that with all these refugees here. So they treated those refugees poorly, and didn’t really give them that much thought. They tucked them away in isolated camps, and got to work on rebuilding their government from the ground up. It was years before they started listening to the people who were trying to explain to them that the Earthans would be able to help them do that. After all, they had just come from a world of equality and fairness, so maybe they had a few pointers? Well, it took some time, and a military state, but society eventually figured it out. Some of the Earthans went back home with the Elizabeth Warren interstellar ship, along with a few Durune who wanted to start new lives, but for everyone left, there didn’t appear to be much chance of further rescue, so the best thing to do for the Earthans was to dig in, and get used to the here and now, instead of dwelling on what might have been. That got easier over the course of the next two decades as policy adapted to the diverse population. One major thing to further this philosophy came in 2185, when the first person to have been born on Earth was elected as president of the Democratic Republic of Durus. They were long past the elitism and bigotry that formed in 2161, but it was still a huge step for the original Durune. On the other side, the Earthans had mostly accepted this as their new home, and that was impressive as well. Everyone was a native now. As for the new president himself, things were a little rough. Earth had moved so far beyond a standard representative democracy by then that he had some trouble understanding that Durus was not technologically advanced enough for a comparable system. He had to make a lot of mistakes, and reach some compromises, and he only lasted one term, but it was a decent start.