Nation State

Hasn’t it been a lovely day again today? You really feel that Spring is on its way. The sun’s just set, the sky’s still blue and the birds are still singing. I hope it’s like this in a few weeks when I head down south for the dancing weekend holiday. It’s a pity that I haven’t enjoyed the weather much today; I started work at 10am and finished at 5.40pm (quite impressed with myself today). However, I did manage a nice walk this morning and, yesterday, when it was just as lovely, I went for a walk near a canal with mum and the dog. Admittedly, it was a bit muddy and we turned back after about 3 minutes, completing our walk in some country lanes instead, but I still enjoyed it (especially when we found some water running uphill and stood watching it for a while and trying to work out why. I solved it but it’s too complicated to explain without a diagram so I’ll conveniently skip over it here). 

This afternoon, I was studying Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and, when I considered the two very different regimes in East and West Germany, I wondered how I would run a coutry if ever I could (not that I want to). Then I remembered something that I haven’t thought about for about 5 years. Once, on Radio 2, there was this guy telling everybody about a particular website. I think he comes on everyday or every week talking about various websites that you might be interested in (this is how we found out about Google Earth). Anyway, this one time he talked about a website where you could set up your own imaginary country and run it, with problems that need solving and things. I did it at the time and it was quite fun. I can’t think why or when I stopped really. I suppose I just got bored of it. So, this afternoon, I thought I’d look it up again and I typed ‘rule your own country’ into Google. I found the site I was looking for. Because I couldn’t remember my old country, I made a new one: The Kingdom of Zschwol (only about three people will understand the relevance of that name). They start by asking you a few questions to get your politcal views (although you can totally make up the answers) and from this they create a nation for you. Mine is a ‘pleasant, tiny nation’ in the West Pacific, with a population of 5 million. It’s quite amusing to see what they diagnose from your answers. Then, every weekday, you get a ‘problem’ appear in your country. There are three views on the issue and whichever you accept or follow determines how your nation develops. My dilema today was about voting (I think everybody gets this one first). I had the options of making voting compulsory for all of my citizens, letting people vote when they want to or (on the advice of my ‘brother’) forgetting the voting system altogether and creating a dictatorship. One thing I can guarantee is that whatever you choose, the affect it has on your nation will be the most extreme. If you chose the first option, it would probably turn out that people will be imprisoned because they do not vote. If you chose the second, it would turn out that nobody in the country would vote and you’d have a political crisis on your hands. The last option is self-explanatory. Obviously, though, it makes it more fun this way. However, I’m going try and be as honest as I can in ruling my nation in the best way that I can and I’ll be interested to see where it gets me. It will take a lot of discipline to resist the temptation of becoming a radical militaristic state of some sort though!