No, this is definitely not your father's Czechia...

Welcome to the new and improved Cesko, ctenari. As we here at the heart of Europe become more fully integrated into the "New European" way of doing things, Czech society is also beginning to fundamentally change for the better. Daily, we're making giant strides that are briskly making up for the more than four decades of our misguided socialist backward criminal past.

Look around you on the streets, people, and marvel at the newcomers who have been washing up on our cobbled Bohemian shores.

How their new colours and styles of dress are forcing us to change our crusty ideas about global culture, a privilege no longer confined to the narrow Czech minority who have had good fortune to travel extensively abroad.

Bam!

The newcomers are finally coming home to roost in the Czech lands, and they're here to stay.

Newcomers who deliver new customs, new ways of dress, and new languages for us to contemplate. All of this faster than a game of five-card stud. Changes that are monumental and overwhelming in the extreme, for a nation like ours on the economic fast track, not quite virginal but not quite "experienced in the sack" either.

I, like you, welcome these changes.

I, like you, hardly think these developments will do anything to diminish our national stature. Rather than harm our vaunted national institutions (egs. the Czech language, Czech culture, our political development) all these new societal strains will only bolster them. They will ricochet back to us in ways we will hardly anticipate, tremendously good ways.

How do I mean?

Let's try this example on for size (one which has been tried time and again in my native Canada.)

A young refugee from Afghanistan arrives at Ruzyne Airport in Prague. Both of his parents have been killed over the course of the more than three decades of constant battle in his native land. He has been selected by a roving Scandinavian EU emissary in his birth province of Kandahar to emigrate to one of the 27 Member States. He has -- in essence -- won the lottery.

As part of its obligations to Brussels and its European confreres, the Czech Republic has been selected as that country. Part of the burgeoning democracy's "refugee and asylum" obligations to the Union. All hail.

The young South Asian arrives in Prague, boldly embarking upon his new life. He quickly enrolls in an intensive Czech language immersion class -- and as he speaks Pashtu and Urdu fluently -- he is put to work in an absorption office as part of a joint Czech-Slovak effort to more fluidly integrate its various Pakistani and Afghani new immigrants. The two, former allies eating their hearts out over their impetuous split back in the "drunk with nationalism" '90s (Havel vs. Meciar would have made for a wicked slugfest back in the day -- Havel minus the paunch, Meciar, without Slota's ugly goons in his corner).

But back to our young Afghani...

Soon, he begins to earn well and his linguistic confidence rises. He speaks the vernacular as well as any native, and over the telephone a native Bohemian would be surprised to learn his name and surname are not typically of the region.

He soon weds a local girl -- an ethnic Czech -- and while she doesn't covert to Islam, she does integrate aspects of her husband's culture into her worldview and behaviour. One nurtures the other. Like mushrooms in fertilizer.




Do you see it? I do.

This sort of activity is only set to increase in the coming months, and as our country becomes more famous the world-over -- both for its unique approaches to humanitarian causes (hooray Mr. Schwarzenberg!) and for its non-violent lifestyle -- it will become a magnet for people fleeing from persecution and insanity in their native states.

I've seen several successful examples of this in Eastern Slovakia, and I can't help but imagining how phenomenally edifying this would work for Cesko.

Considering how the various "new Canadians" have provided such a shot in the arm to my native country -- people like my parents in their day, and now people hailing from India, China, Hong Kong, Ethiopia, Argentina, etc. -- I'm almost breathless thinking how this will even further place us smack on the European map.

Woe to Czech knuckle-dragging types (read: antisocial bigoted apes) who loathe such observations on my part. To them, my scribblings are tantamount to national hari-kiri.

Oh well, to you I throw a banana. No, take two why don't you?

Like I said, this definitely ain't your father's Czech Republic...