Join the new world

All right, so this has been a very interesting month. As a freshman Congressman, I felt like joining the Legislative branch of eUSA was sort of like diving into the deep end of a pool that was filled with mustard and ketchup. (I'm not sure what sort of metaphor that is; I think I'm just hungry.)

It's not hard to be a Congressman-- one just has to get elected and put on the right slot by the Party President-- but actually doing a half-way decent job of it does require a great deal of time and effort. I honestly had no idea what the job involved when I first ran, which might seem a bit arrogant but ultimately was just pure ignorance. I'm glad I did it: I enjoyed it in a way I know many people do not. But I am aware now that if I am ever to do a truly great job at it, I will have to do far more research into game history and game mechanics than I have done so far.

I attempted to compensate for my shortcomings by staying active, partaking in as many threads on the eUSAforums as I could, and by keeping abreast of all the many congress messages that accumulated in my in-box. That is: when I wasn't sure that I was making an informed vote, I went with the party line.

Still, being eager and showing up is only half the battle. Perhaps the most important half, as you would be surprised in life how many other people end up capitulating or compromising simple because they have no fight in them. Which is why America will always be important, in or out of game. I don't like our cowboy culture as it leads to bullys and victims and then victims who turn into psychopaths-- but the constantly battling for pecking order and gives us a stamina for battle and war that no other culture can match.

But I digress. Showing up is only half the battle. Knowing how to fight is the other half. And I don't think it's possible to absorb everything you need to know-- even a general lay of the land-- in less than a month, perhaps a month and a half.

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A note about voting:

I'll give you guys a clue, for those who find life one big wall of teal deer (tl dr) text... it turns out that I was right, when I initially said most votes would break down 37 to 15, or 15 to 37. If you can read English as your native language, you can just wait until 20 or 22 hours into a vote and go with whatever the other 36 people did.

I don't recommend this, as I feel it's better to always be a bit informed about what you're doing or voting on, but it's a viable strategy. Even some AFA people did it, especially the one who just wanted to deal with their own things: there were quite a few votes that actually swung around to something like 51 to 1, or 49 to 3.

And while I'd like to say Unity is always Unity, there were also one or two votes that actually ending being something like '28 to 24' or '30 to 22.' Not many. Perhaps 4% or 5% of the time. But there are genuine ideological differences between the four Unity parties.

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One final wor😛

IF I could go back in time one month and tell myself something about Congress I didn't know now... well, I would say that you only see how antagonistic the AFA is to eUSA when you're in Congress. I was far more naive about what they were up to, and more open to believing things like "How can you blame them for selling citizenship when ATO people do the same?" Well, it's not true. There's a whole section of Congress called "IES" and it has threads upon threads discussing various people who want to be citizen, and it has instructions by Dr. Luis and various spreadsheets and printouts and stuff. It's some pretty complicated stuff, but it's there and it's proof that the ATO people are fairly honest and reasonable about what they are doing.