The Wall

Anniversaries cause me to wonder, “How did we get here?” This week brought triple anniversaries. I relate personally to two – the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street and the 100th anniversary of E. M. Daggett Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas. The third was the international observance of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago. I woke up one morning to see television pictures of people hammering on the concrete barrier and rushing through holes where for 28 years anyone who tried to climb the wall was shot. No one expected it to happen so suddenly and so peacefully.

I was in Berlin only once and only briefly. This was in 1994. Our tour group rode around on a bus for a couple of hours and stopped at the Brandenburg gate, in front of which President Ronald Reagan made his famous speech: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

I stood in the plaza watching the traffic, cars, trucks, and buses racing in front of arches topped with horses representing Imperial Germany. I bought a postcard at a souvenir stand offering mugs, tee shirts, and all the usual tourist junk. Behind the piles of stuff, the salesperson was a young brown-skinned woman wearing a head scarf. To me that Muslim represented the many changes, not only in Germany, but throughout the World since the wall came down.

I lived through the Cold War, when we were told an attack from the Communists might come at any moment. President Reagan initiated the “Star Wars” program, spending billions of our tax dollars on missiles designed to shoot down Russian missiles before they could destroy U.S. cities. The national debt soared, but those expensive anti-missile missiles did not. When test fired, none ever hit its target.

The Soviet Union never intended to attack us. They feared we would attack them. The Soviets drained their nation in building defensive weapons, spending so much money on armaments that the civilian economy went bankrupt. That’s when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Some people thought it was all due to President Reagan’s diplomacy!

The Wall came down, but Germany is still struggling with the problems of reunification. In Eastern Europe I saw people suffering from the hardships of factories closed and jobs lost when the Russians stopped buying their products.

Part of our present economic situation can be traced back to waste in our defense against Communism. War in Vietnam cost not only our material wealth, but, tragically, over 58,000 young men dead. Project “Iraqi Freedom” was based on the false assumption that we could impose democracy on a people who had been ruled by foreigners for 2,000 years and had no experience with self-government. Now our boys are dying in Afghanistan, another country where the people don’t want us. We spend billions every day – and Congress quibbles about the cost of providing health care!

Many people in the World would like to build a wall and keep us out.