新年致辭英文
prague, january 1, 1990
my dear fellow citizens,
for forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.
i assume you did not propose me for this office so that i, too, would lie to you.
our country is not flourishing. the enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nations is not being used sensibly. entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. a state which calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits workers. our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. a country that once could be proud of the educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world. we have polluted the soil, rivers and forests bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in europe. adults in our country die earlier than in most other european countries.
allow me a small personal observation. when i flew recently to bratislava, i found some time during discussions to look out of the plane window. i saw the industrial complex of slovnaft chemical factory and the giant petr'alka housing estate right behind it. the view was enough for me to understand that for decades our statesmen and political leaders did not look or did not want to look out of the windows of their planes. no study of statistics available to me would enable me to understand faster and better the situation in which we find ourselves.
but all this is still not the main problem. the worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. we fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. we learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgivenelost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful and that the special farms, which produced ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children's homes and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.