The Golden eRule

Day 715, 04:06 • Published in USA USA • by mjdiv

In the past 9 months that I’ve been alive in eRepublik, I have noticed that eUSA has grown and matured quite a bit. Back then, I think many of our citizens did not realize the value of good relationships with other countries and some of our citizens were unrealistically biased by the real-life military might of the United States. I remember when many citizens would call for “RWAR!” with whichever of our neighbors we could attack (and we attacked most of them). We attacked Canada, France, Portugal and Mexico - just because we thought it would be “fun”. Those that were born after that may understand in context why we had such a bad reputation in the world as a country that was only interested in ourselves. Not one of our states had ever been invaded and we enjoyed a naïve period of believing that we could never be conquered and that we could do whatever we wanted without the help of anyone else in the world.

If there are lessons that war can teach, thankfully we have hopefully learned from this one. Just a couple of months ago, we seemed helpless as the PEACE GC nations masterfully coordinated attacks in carefully timed sequences which completely wiped out Canada, North Korea, Spain and conquered every state in USA with the exception of Florida. I remember serving in Congress in Florida as we made preparations for the recovery of our nation and our citizens came to the sobering realization that yes, we do need the help of our allies and we cannot win alone. To my knowledge, it was the first time in history that the end of the congressional term was not full of useless “lulz” proposals, because we actually needed the votes to keep the money moving to fund our military and citizen programs. We reduced our trade barriers so that our citizens could obtain inexpensive food and weapons and opened our economy up so that our citizens could enjoy the best that our nation and each of our allies had to offer and our allies started to respond in kind. We opened up the doors of diplomacy and started to ask “what can we do for you?” instead of “we’ll do whatever we want” and more nations began to respect us and were willing to help. Many nations came to our aid and fought in battles for us and we fought for them and we began to treat the other nations as equals and deserving of their own sovereignty just as we are of ours. It is when the idea of USA being an imperialistic, conquering nation went down and the idea that eUSA can be a great ally that the tides started to turn and others started to trust us and work together with us as we worked not only for our own benefit, but also the benefit of our allies.

Hopefully by now we’ve grown to understand how important our connection with the rest of the world is and that no one nation in eRepublik can achieve long-term success without the cooperation of other countries. Many lessons have been learned during the war and our nation has matured with the realization that mutual success is the only one that can and will be sustained as we will unselfishly defend our allies’ interests just as they will defend ours. It is only through this spirit of cooperation that our allies were able to come together to achieve military, political and economic victories and that same cooperative spirit will carry us forward in the future.

As long as we don’t forget these lessons that we have learned, then we will remain a great nation as well as a great ally to other nations in the world. We must always remember that alone any one nation will eventually fall. But with a strong alliance that is well coordinated politically, economically and socially as well as militarily, we can all achieve mutual victories with our friends around the world. If we treat each other with respect and dignity, and honor our commitments, then we will even be able to enjoy an occasional sparring match with an opposing alliance in competition and, when it’s over, be able to reach over the virtual table, shake their hand and say “Good Game! Let’s do that again!”

We may want to do it in different ways, but all of us players in whatever alliance we happen to be in want the same thing - to be able to achieve prosperity in the country of our choice (especially if it is our real-life homeland), to achieve victories on the battlefields and to have great interactions and earn the respect of people from far beyond our hometowns. So remember, above all else, we should live by The Golden eRule - Treat others as you want to be treated, have fun and enjoy another day in eRepublik!