[EXTRA] The Campaign Experience: Reflections

Day 2,117, 19:56 • Published in Japan Japan • by ahava3233


Hey it's ahava3233 reporting after taking a holiday over election day. In any event, before I proceed, I want to say.

Congratulations Squibeel! I was honoured to run my first complete CP campaign against you. You are quite frankly one the most smartest, friendliest, and most creative people in this country. I know that with you in the lead, Japan's future shines bright. I expect great things this month and I look forward to working with you and the rest of the cabinet as your Prime Minister! Japan this is not over, I have no intention of slowing my political career due to my loss last night.

Now back on topic. I had quite an interesting few days, I learned a lot from the experience, in particular about Constantine the Great and leadership. I'd like to share my thoughts to you all.



The old Sakurakai logo I dug up from my old articles

Sakurakai

Some background you should know about me before I proceed. Personally, I was a key member of a past party known as Sakurakai. Sakurakai was quite an active party, but then things went awry when what is now Constantine The Great started to enter the country through my party. Eventually, the PTO overcame us when I was running in a PP election against Fidel R. Kastro, a current CTG member. Then under my lead, the whole country took action against them.





Enter CTG

So obviously, I was apprehensive when my party members in the Shinsengumi recommended that I partner with CTG after I announced my desire to candidate. My original intention was to work with SOS and ISP due to my previous work with their members, but given my trust in Shinsengumi's leadership due to past experience as well as my open-mind I proceeded as I wanted to try something new. After all, I was intent on running a government with the best interests of all of the country in mind and I was going to do my best listen to everybody's opinion to draw my judgments as CP. Things went from there.


This cartoon is Turt037's work from his paper, Hear yee, titled, Triumphant of the Glory Dome, see here.

CTG proved to be slightly different than I expected, I found their party to be quite an anomaly...their gameplay extended into real life, something otherwise unheard of in eJapan. Several CTG members showed me images (here and here) of their group (which is international in the New World) attending RL meetings and partying up with their CTG friends (yes, Mr. There-are-No-Girls-on-the-Internet (Tarasino), both male and female players, xD). They're a tight-knit group who share in a type of fraternity completely alien to eJapan. Many of them made the analogy of comparing erepublik to facebook in their lives. It's quite a marvelous thing they have going on internally.

However, although I am fond of their model, can they work with Japan as they are now as a whole? I am not sure. CTG has exceptions to the rule, but by and large the party is honestly a Serbian ghetto, and if life experience proves me right, people in ghettos tend not to integrate into the larger communities that well given trust issues. Being in a ghetto gives you a comfort zone to retreat to, thus while they may have some patriotism towards Japan, the land they've moved to, their conflicting love of their homeland is kept alive in their microcosmic community. They furthermore keep very strong ties to the rest of their community in eSerbia due to their real life bonds with those back in their eHomeland.

Looking back, this was probably the reason why CTG required that a deal be struck between our parties in order to work as a coalition. When one lives in a ghetto, trust is an issue. It was thus agreed that CTG member had to take the position of Prime Minister in my cabinet, and CTG delegates also had to be placed in my MoF and MoD. However, as you all know, this caused quite a bit of backlash and was probably the primary reason of the failure of my campaign given the intense in-game Serbophobia in this country due to previous scandals, including the Sakurakai incident.

To be honest, I did my best to aim my campaign against the omnipresent Serbophobia by expressing my intent to keep a close eye on the cabinet in my campaign article (and thus implicitly, the CTG element of the government), but I still lost. Probably justifiably too, it would certainly be difficult for a CP to lead her country while micromanaging certain elements of her cabinet to do what she desires, she needs to allow them to do their job. After all, by definition, eRepublik does not allow for dictatorship as all countries are Democratic Republiks (except maybe Saudi Arabia with their one-party system, xD).



More like Shana Tova (eg: Happy Rosh Hashanah, see below), but you get my point. 😛

Leadership

On Election Day, I went to the house of my first cousin, once removed for a casual Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) get together. While I was there, an interesting topic came up in a discussion her husband. Albeit he was drunk (as he always is when I see him) and mostly talking nonsense, he mentioned something about leadership when we were talking about how to succeed in life. The idea was thus, if you take the initiative and don't doubt yourself on your ideas, others are likely to follow you and you could be a force to be reckoned with. That is almost certainly what happened this during this campaign and probably why I did reasonably well despite having many in the community stacked against me. During the campaign, I truly believed in CTG being able to be a cooperative and positive force in Japan and I didn't doubt myself on the matter. Reflecting now, again, I'm just not sure that's the case unless CTG does their own part and changes somewhat. After all, distrust for CTG involvement in politics is rampant due to past scandals as well as the strong foreign influence within Constantine.

However, I can assure you that I intend to help lead this month as Squibeel's Prime Minister. I am going to help rebuild this country and bring up its level of activity by starting from the ground up with the rest of the cabinet--I am far from done in politics. However, I do believe that I need to take another look at the internal politics within this country after my campaign to figure out exactly where I'm going in my eCareer.


There's my reflection, hope you enjoyed my honest thoughts in this article. Some parts of this article, honestly they were quite difficult to write as I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings...but I just felt giving an honest reflection was a necessary thing.

Please feel free to vote, subscribe, or comment; or not it's your call.




~ahava3233