On...200th Post...The Day the Wall Came Down

20 years of Freedom

This is a glorious anniversary, and one that become more and more distant. And with it the pure impact fades. This is a saddening truth of history. I was thirteen when the Iron Curtain began to shudder and creak. I imagine people younger than me don't have the same sense of what communism was (is) and the havoc it unleashed upon the world. Americans born right around 1976 may be that last group of citizens who can begin to understand the significance. Younger than that might not grasp the conflict. I know I have trouble relaying the magnitude of the Cold War to my students. Though certainly not as strong as those kids growing up in the 60s, anyone say born after 1981 never realized how it felt living on a planet where World War III was not merely fiction, but something very real. You lived under that realization that the whole world might be gone any minute. Movies like War Games, Red Dawn, The Hunt for Red October, Red Heat, The Day After, etc were locked into that era. But they will slowly seem like time capsules from a weird age.

This week is an appropriate time to reflect and relearn what really went down in Berlin twenty years ago and feel the powerful echo of liberty casting aside tyranny one more time--learn how free expression and free markets are longer lasting than state planning and single vision. Lessons many Americans need to think more deeply on.

I do regret that President Obama is not in Berlin just as Presidents Kennedy and Reagan were. What a missed opportunity for inspired leadership. I guess the Olympics and Greenhouse Gases are more important to him than universal examples of freedom.

The current issue of the Economist covers the anniversary and the History Channel is playing a couple of good specials on the event.

Here are other similar themed posts:

After the wall fell: Central Europe's success deserves more attention by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post

The Berlin Wall fell and a new Europe rose: Daily Telegraph UK Edition

The Lessons of 1989 by Christopher Hitchens, Slate.com

Why Berlin Mattered by Fred Kaplan, Slate.com

Reagan and Leadership

Tear Down This Wall Speech

Four Little Words by Anthony R. Dolan, Wall Street Journal

Ronald Reagan's unyielding style won the Cold War by Rudy Guiliani, NY Daily News

Video Highlight
ABC NEWS Breaking News November 9th, 1989 with Peter Jennings

NY POST Agrees that President Obama not going to Berlin is a missed opportunity.
Berlin Wall Blunder