Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Watching the world wake up from history
Fifteen years ago tonight, we watched the wall come down.
The symbol of the division between east and west; the wall of shame and grief that had cost many brave people their lives, and that had riven a great city long after the evil that had occasioned it was gone; the Berlin Wall, intractable, immovable, implacable...
...fell.
Fell under the hammers and crowbars and jubilant stomping feet of the newly freed.
Fell under the cyclopean spotlight of world attention.
Fell under the unrelenting assault of the free world.
We watched in our dorm suite at the University of Virginia; a handful of boys from all over the nation, who had grown up with the wall a grim, though distant, reality; a reality as solid as the moon, and as permanent. We'd heard Reagan tell Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall, but we never believed we would live to see it happen, or to see it happen without a shot fired against its ugly bulk.
We watched and were transfixed by the images of the celebration: the crowds, the cheering, the laughter and the dancing, the tearful reunions long dreamed of. We shared the elation. We were giddy, laughing and cheering with equal measures of joy and astonishment. It happened. It really happened!
And we saw the last dying spasms of a fear we had known our entire lives; the certain knowledge that each night as we lay down to sleep, we might be awakened by a flash of light and a brief, painless hint of overpressure. We prayed in our youth: God, if it happens, spare me: don't let me survive that flash to die of radiation poisoning days or weeks later, vomiting out my own guts. Let death be quick.
That fear fell, for me, that night when the wall fell.
That Monday, I went to my Introduction to International Politics 101 class, a course taught by Kenneth Thompson, a gentleman in every sense of the word, who taught us to question dogmatic assertions of the rightness and wrongness of any side of international conflicts, and in whose class I learned the principles of the balance of power of nations. During the first class after the wall fell, Dr. Thompson and all his teaching assistants gathered at the front of the auditorium in Wilson Hall and told us that there was no roadmap for the territory we had just entered, that all bets were off... but that the principles we had been taught would still be valuable in guiding us in the future. They were right on both counts.
And they were as giddy as we were.
That night, we were not Americans or Germans or British or French; we were citizens of the free world, watching the liberation of people long imprisoned. We stood on the threshold of freedom to greet them and to bid them welcome, at last.
Fifteen years ago tonight.
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The symbol of the division between east and west; the wall of shame and grief that had cost many brave people their lives, and that had riven a great city long after the evil that had occasioned it was gone; the Berlin Wall, intractable, immovable, implacable...
...fell.
Fell under the hammers and crowbars and jubilant stomping feet of the newly freed.
Fell under the cyclopean spotlight of world attention.
Fell under the unrelenting assault of the free world.
We watched in our dorm suite at the University of Virginia; a handful of boys from all over the nation, who had grown up with the wall a grim, though distant, reality; a reality as solid as the moon, and as permanent. We'd heard Reagan tell Mr. Gorbachev to tear down this wall, but we never believed we would live to see it happen, or to see it happen without a shot fired against its ugly bulk.
We watched and were transfixed by the images of the celebration: the crowds, the cheering, the laughter and the dancing, the tearful reunions long dreamed of. We shared the elation. We were giddy, laughing and cheering with equal measures of joy and astonishment. It happened. It really happened!
And we saw the last dying spasms of a fear we had known our entire lives; the certain knowledge that each night as we lay down to sleep, we might be awakened by a flash of light and a brief, painless hint of overpressure. We prayed in our youth: God, if it happens, spare me: don't let me survive that flash to die of radiation poisoning days or weeks later, vomiting out my own guts. Let death be quick.
That fear fell, for me, that night when the wall fell.
That Monday, I went to my Introduction to International Politics 101 class, a course taught by Kenneth Thompson, a gentleman in every sense of the word, who taught us to question dogmatic assertions of the rightness and wrongness of any side of international conflicts, and in whose class I learned the principles of the balance of power of nations. During the first class after the wall fell, Dr. Thompson and all his teaching assistants gathered at the front of the auditorium in Wilson Hall and told us that there was no roadmap for the territory we had just entered, that all bets were off... but that the principles we had been taught would still be valuable in guiding us in the future. They were right on both counts.
And they were as giddy as we were.
That night, we were not Americans or Germans or British or French; we were citizens of the free world, watching the liberation of people long imprisoned. We stood on the threshold of freedom to greet them and to bid them welcome, at last.
Fifteen years ago tonight.
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