Tell most people younger than me that there were once two Germanys and two Berlins and they'll look at you like you've suddenly sprouted a third arm in the center of your chest. They don't remember a world where a great city was divided by concrete barricades and when all of Europe was divided by an iron curtain; or when two superpowers stood toe-to-toe and tried to spend one another into oblivion through proxy wars and an arms race. And then we watched that world that we had all grown up with dissolve before our eyes on cable television.
If a man is extraordinarily lucky, he gets to live through that kind of change once in his lifetime. In twenty years there's been nothing to compare those days against. A hundred years from now when the first relatively objective histories of the last half of the 20th century are being written, they will tell the story of leaders like Walesa, Thatcher, Reagan, John Paul II and Gorbachev. They'll tell stories of round the clock airlifts to ensure the freedom of a city cut off from the rest of the world. They'll tell stories of every day heroics by those who sought freedom on both sides of the wall. And finally they'll tell stories about the day that wall was torn down.
Twenty years ago today, all the world watched and wondered as the unthinkable happened, as history suddenly shifted on its axis, as the rising tide of freedom washed over the concrete battlements of an empire in retreat. I can’t imagine when I’d rather be than right here, right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment