Czech President Miloš Zeman doesn’t want his people to become flabby and weak, so he sent them an unusual greeting on Christmas.
Many thanks to JLH for translating this brief article published yesterday in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Unusual Christmas Greeting — President Zeman Wishes the Czechs a “Dangerous Life”
December 25, 2016
The Czech president, Miloš Zeman, is wishing the people of his land “a dangerous life full of risks and battles.”
Just traditionally “wishing health, happiness and a long life would be too unoriginal and just a phrase,” is how the head of state on Sunday on radio Frekvence 1 explained his unusual New Year’s wish.
Naturally, he wished his people victories and successes, said Zeman. “But if they fight no battles, they can not win and be successful,” explained the president, whose controversial comments constantly supply the flammable matter for Czech politics.
A real president.
And a realistic one.
And a fine leader!
I think Zeman is aware of the biological generality that a population not subject to constant environmental pressures will lose its adaptability and adaptions.
In other words, if you simply allow a population to drift for generations without any real life-or-death situations, you will get a bland, damaged population with no resistance to the eventual predator that is sure to come: like the native population of Sweden.
The stress of former communism may well turn out to be the biggest advantage the Eastern European countries have.
Einstein’s gravest fear was that technology would surpass the grasp of humanity to understand the implications it would bring to de-socializing and de-sensitizing the human civilizational structure.
We have been trained to think inside a box while we still fly around the globe in old technology that was developed back in the 1920s and 30s (the jet engine) but we are able to have 21st Century communication devices (smartphone) that give instant access right across the world and that have made many too reliant on possessing and using them.
I should add to that………while completely ignoring those around them.
To the point of walking into fountains. It’s frightening to technology-illiterates like me to watch these zombies in a world of their own, wandering along a busy street talking or texting, completely oblivious to the world around them.
Not only that, but as we all know–driving.
And at the risk of seeming a dinosaur, sitting with friends in bars and coffee shops while reading emails from (presumably) other friends. The way I was brought up, that’s just rude.