A prayer for 2025

OK it’s not really a prayer.  It’s from a speech by Vaclav Havel, who spent five years in jail when the Communists ruled Czechoslovakia.  Havel later was elected President of Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic.

Let us try in a new time and in a new way to revive this concept of politics.  Let us teach both ourselves and others that politics ought to be a reflection of the aspiration to the happiness of the community and not of the need to deceive or pillage the community.  Let us teach both ourselves and others that politics does not have to be the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculating, calculating, intrigues, secret agreements, and pragmatic maneuvering, but that it can also be the art of the impossible, that is the art of making both ourselves and the world better.

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Our worst enemy today is our own bad qualities–indifference to public affairs, conceit, ambition, selfishness, the pursuit of personal advancement and rivalry–and that is the main struggle we are faced with.