UPDATE: This is how a potential mid-21st-century Czech might look, following the election of Mr. Jan Svejnar as President of the Republic, or as the next Foreign Minister when Mr. Schwarzenberg resigns, or even if Johnny Boy is elected to the Chamber of Deputies as part of a new Czech political party.

I dedicate today's post to my esteemed Aktualne.cz colleague, The Sultan of The Story, Pavel "Pablo" Vondra and my dear Bohemian friend, eminent cinephile, and guide extraordinaire, Eva C. Both are jointly responsible for this morning's e-inspiration.


I, like you, was recently watching Miss Nella Simaova go about her icy business down in Zagreb on the yo-yo box the other day. Her powerful jumps and her grace in the rink were captivating sights to behold, giving me a momentary burst of pride and chill down my spine. You know that feeling I'm talking about?

Yet a competing thought clashed with that spot of brilliance. It had to do with the doubt I was also feeling about my possible misplaced pride. Whether I was, in fact, being self-delusional. Whether I was projecting my hopeful, expectant feelings for a New 21st-century Cesko onto the image on the television screen. I asked myself whether what I was actually viewing was the exception, instead of the norm.

To be sure, Miss Simaova is charismatic. In most nations in our half of the globe, if not our own, she'd be the envy of the male persuasion, hardly an argument there. But her appearance is more than just a superficial issue. It speaks to something deeper about what's going on in the CR; societal strains which will hopefully adapt Cesko to better endure in a globalized context.

Allow me to kindly to do some "pipelaying" to bolster my point:

For one, we are the Central European leaders.

We have a duty to demonstrate to our eastern neighbours that they have nothing to fear from the Western-inspired innovations soon to come their way. If they work here -- and they certainly are working here, no argument there -- then there's a high probability they'll succeed over there.

As part of that obligation, we must constantly strive to deliver the promised gains of an open-minded, free world to the millions of former captives of the Hammer & Sickle set. Sometimes it's painful, oftentimes it's against the established mentality which has been flailed into us for decades, but Czechs must swallow the castor oil of change which will only strengthen our collective, catapulting us onward to surging growth.

For two, ideally positioned as we are at the crossroads of so many different paths -- East vs. West, North vs. South, Old vs. New, Developed vs. Developing -- we should herald the arrival of newcomers to our society whom we may never never have met before.

Africans definitely come to mind, and in the coming years, citizens of nations with names like Angola and Cameroon will become increasingly commonplace here.

Looking at Simaova, with her flawless spoken cestina (she is Czech -- the only thing "African" about her is the colour of her skin), one cannot be overwhelmed with an inexplicable pride which perhaps is out of place for our typically dour selves.

Kindly forgive the long introduction to what is essentially a very simple issue:

I'm often rebuked in casual conversation by colleagues that my pie-in-the-sky "Canadian" model of society -- mapped, as it were, onto the Czech Republic -- is a model that won't ever work for these people.

One of the frequent rails I'm on the receiving end of (noted here by some commenters in the past) is the fact that Canadian society, as it's presently comprised, is nonsense.

Nonense, from the context of having no grounding, no base, directionless like flotsam in the Vltava.

Founded as a multicultural society, especially since the late 1960s, Canada is a glorious experiment which has for the most part succeeded. It's one of the few countries on the planet where people from a multitude of different faiths and cultures come rallied under the banner of an Us which supercedes the feared They.

The inherent gains from multi-ethnic societies are legend, but I'll list just a few examples of them now:

** produces an open, tolerant society.
** strengthens the gene pool and reduces anatomical, biological anomalies which occasionally crop up from generational inbreeding.
** results in more novel, diverse ideas because of such divergent combinations (eg. it's what happens when someone from China goes to the same primary school as someone from Jamaica, for example).
** on record, produces a more entrepreneurial society, which benefits the nation as a whole.

Czech society is robust, courageous, and meaningful. In light of the nation's oppressive past, the Czech (and Slovak) people have withstood the weight of oceans, yet have emerged scathed, but resilient.

If our history has proved anything, it's that we cannot -- and will not -- carry on living as an island in the middle of this continent, unaffected by the societal tidal flows which have been washing over the rest of the world.

As a citizen of the EU, I welcome the advent of a "Canadian-style" Czech society. Only the truly blind cannot already see that the city of Prague is becoming this way, and may it remain so. So it always proceeds; modernity and innovation find their home in the capital cities, then proliferating outwards towards the suburbs and the regions.

The gains to Czech society from a multi-ethnic, and moreover, multi-racial, society are the following:

** Czech youth will once and for all observe that radical change is indeed possible. If a newcomer like Miss Simaova can break into the hallowed echelons of Czech(oslovak) sport, then indeed change has come home to roost.
** I say the following clinically, not racially: injecting a new chromosomal strain into the Czech gene pool will strengthen the DNA core of that same pool. And I take no credit for this theory. Eminent US legal expert, Alan M. Dershowitz, has claimed so himself in several of his professional writings that a multi-ethnic strain has been good for nations like the US and Israel, for example, what with its European, North African, Middle Eastern, Arabic, Druze, Ethiopian, and Central Asian admixtures which have made Israel's population's gene pool more resistant to disease. Considering the record-high number of sick days that Czechs are notorious for, this can only be a good thing (not counting the people who enjoy visiting their physicians on social calls!).
** Czech society can continue to cement its Central European leadership position by carrying the "innovation torch" aloft. We are unafraid to try new things and introduce world-beating change into our nation.

So what do you think?