War and PEACE, Kitty Puzzles, and Ajay Bruno

Day 626, 15:50 • Published in USA USA • by Jaxon Leith

A famous and brilliant doctor once quoted the illustrious Rolling Stones: “You can’t always get what you want.” He and his boss were having an argument (as I recall, about clinic duty). The doctor obviously did not want to do clinic duty, and his boss wanted him to. After a period of thinking, she also quoted the Rolling Stones, to finish off the lyric: “But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

These two inadvertently stumbled upon the most important lesson a politician can learn: compromise. Bipartisanship and compromise ensure many things, the first of which is constant improvement. Black needs its white to constantly challenge and improve it, just as opposing ideas constantly need to conflict with each other to change and make everyone better off. However, ideology is that little nagging thing that always gets in the way. When you think inside a box instead of outside of it, there is no challenge and there is no improvement.

If you can’t guess by now, there are several people who could learn a lesson from this, and their chief is Ajay Bruno. Instead of listening to his opponents, he bans them from chat, tells them he’ll make them pay, and spouts racist comments. He calls PEACE an “evil empire” as if there is a good and evil in eRepublik. Instead of learning lessons, he shuts his ears and starts yelling nonsense (literally and figuratively). This leads to division, not the togetherness we need in these times. Only by being cooperative and willing to compromise can we even hope to defeat PEACE.

This all reminds me of an analogy we came up with the other night that I’ve rather expanded upon. So, several of us were on OMGPop playing a jigsaw puzzle, which was totally a kitty. It’s a cooperative puzzle and everyone can move the pieces around and put them together. There are five sorts of people I found that emerge in ground situations.

There’s the doer, who puts the puzzle together and focuses on the task at hand. Then there’s the joker, who moves the puzzle pieces around just to create chaos and laugh the entire time. His opposite is the cleaner, who organizes the pieces so that everyone else’s job is easier, but he also gets nothing done. Following is the gloryhog, who hordes pieces so no one else can make connections and then takes the credit when the puzzle is finished (think Claire and her supersecret plan to save the eUS). Then there’s the strawman, whose cursor sits there idle while he talks about how to do the puzzle but never tries it himself (this one wasn’t there…we don’t play OMGPop with Ajay).

We need more doers, and less strawmen.

Another big problem we have here, after we get past the bipartisanship, is the inability of some (You know who) to put RL politics out of the picture. Erepublik and real life are two completely different systems with two different foundations. For one, it’s easier to stop playing eRepublik than to stop living life. That’s why we have to work hard with programs like Meals on Wheels to keep people playing and grow our country. Ajay calls it socialism, and it would be, if we were in real life. But things work differently here. Working is easier and there’s no excuse not to work. So no one’s getting a free ride. The government also has less control over the money supply, as most of that is done by the admins. There’s no physical crime, no abortion, no marriage of any kind (except by contract…). So all those issues RL politicians get mixed up in, we don’t have to worry about! That’s the best part of this game, so I’m at a loss as to why people like Ajay try to bring them in. We don’t want them here.

People seeking office, then, are confined to three areas to demonstrate their abilities: economics, military, and leadership (which foreign affairs falls under). Ajay has demonstrated proficiency in none of these. He does not serve in the military, has never owned a company or had any economic policy other than “lower taxes,” and has never demonstrated an ability to get anything done other than alienating people. The people he attacks, in fact, are the people who have this experience, because they have something he doesn’t.

For all these reasons, I ask that you make real change in the Conservative Victory Party and vote me in as party president. I don’t ban people from channels that I disagree with and I’m committed to getting things done. I don’t use words emptily and insult others based on race, gender, or whatever. And most importantly, I can tell there’s a difference between RL and eRepublik.

I’m Jaxon Leith, and I’d like to apply for the party president position.