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.
the previous regime - armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology - reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. in this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. it reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. it could not do more than slowly but inexorably wear out itself and all its nuts and bolts.
when i talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere, i am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. i am talking about all of us. we had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. in other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. none of us is just its victim. we are all also its co-creators.
why do i say this? it would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. on the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. if we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone to do something about it. we cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue, but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. and it would be wrong to expect a general remedy from them alone. freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.
if we realize this, then all the horrors that the new czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. if we realize this, hope will return to our hearts.
in the effort to rectify matters of common concern, we have something to lean on. the recent period - and in particular the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution - has shown the enormous human, moral and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, i always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is unwise to trust only the face it presents to you. i am happy that i was not mistaken. everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical and seemingly cynical citizens of czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake the totalitarian yoke from their shoulders in several weeks, and in a decent and peaceful way. and let us ask: where did the young people who never knew another system get their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? how did it happen that their parents -- the very generation that had been considered lost -- joined them? how is it that so many people immediately knew what to do and none needed any advice or instruction?