25 years ago the Berlin Wall came down. Just over 2 years before that, a US President said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! And it was so. Two weeks before the Wall came down, I was in East Berlin. The weekend Gorbachev had been there and told the East German leadership that no, he would not send in the tanks this time. The weekend of a state-run exhibition in East Berlin celebrating the glorious achievements of the DDR under Communism. You should have seen the angry body language of the East Berliners. I didnt just see it, I felt it, literally, from the angry and unconcerned with decorum movement patterns of Good communist East Germans enraged as they viewed that propaganda. Quite a few of them so pissed off they were bumping into people left and right, including me. I had my own little interview by the Stasi that night, when I and two Canadian travelers Id met up with in a pub in East Berlin, got detained and questioned for hours, including by an agent provocateur supposed fellow young traveled added to our holding room. When I finally was released, when I took the long slow walk down the barbed-wire-fenced corridor, until I finally passed under the big US Flag with the sign, Welcome to the American Sector, I was never so relieved and yes, patriotically thrilled to see the power of my home country, the USA, keeping the peace and trying to be a bastion of liberty. (Those unfamiliar with the Cold War era should note that the USA did not keep up an occupation of Germany nor force its form of government, other than that in Berlin, a city still technically under military occupation divided into British, French; American, and Soviet zones, the three western zones being jointly considered and mostly locally-ruled as West Berlin but technically each separate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Berlin#West_and_East_Germany_.281945-1990.29) Seven months after the Wall came down, I was back in Berlin. Not East Berlin, not West Berlin, but a unified Berlin. Walking unimpeded through the Brandenburg Gate, rather than being processed through Checkpoint Charlie. On my way to a Global Unity conference in what had recently been communist Czechoslovakia, was then (briefly) the CSFR, Czech and Slovak Federated Republic, where my wife and I were among the US delegates to a group of Western and Easterners. A few days later sharing vodka with a bunch of Russians and Hungarians. One of the Russians whom I saw a year later in the crowd supporting Yeltsin as he climbed onto the vehicle in Moscow declaring that the coup would not stand. That led directly to the end of the Soviet Union. Fulfilling the rest of what Reagan had prophesied. Whatever your or my politics are of today, or if you were, like me, of politically aware and active age back then, your and my world today is different, because of the leaders, the heroes, of that age. Including this President, Ronald Reagan. A man I did not vote for, but when it comes to what he did to end the Cold War, and to sincerely work to try to eliminate the threat of nuclear war, someone whom I consider a hero indeed, and a true leader. President Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, are the trinity that led the world to change. Along with many others, such as Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, A change to a better world that we have massively screwed up since them, with uncontrolled capitalism that is in no way what Reagan promoted, with diminished leadership that falls so short of what the giants of that time were, but a better world which we have not totally yet lost. Gorbachev today, this past week, warns us, from Berlin, of the risk of a new Cold War. Socialist-oriented but humanist, libertarian-influenced leaders of today, like José Mujica of my chosen country of residence and hope-for someday citizenship, Uruguay, warn us of the excesses of consumerism. Our increased economic inequality in the West, far worse in the USA than in Reagans time, and our far worse partisan politics as seen in this past weeks US elections, warn us of letting any ideology, including an unfettered free market go too far. Surveillance by US and allied governments far worse than anything ever done by the East German Stasi, now defended by Democratic Presidents and Republican leaders alike. There was a possibility of a better world. It, to a large extent, began right where you can watch in this video. Not only with that very flawed man, and flawed President, but indeed he was very much a part of it. Im sharing this from having seen it from an old friend who shared it, one with whom I recently reconnected, A friend who spent those years serving in our underseas nuclear deterrent force, and also in our intelligence community, and later in civilian defense department service to research how to better protect troops from IEDs. He, and the others who served and who served in our US and our allies military and intelligence communities, who served and followed lawful orders and led, also are heroes of that new world that could have been and could still be. I will never stop patriotically criticizing the abuses of US power, but the valid and necessary uses of it, thanks to people like that, are indeed deserving of all our thanks.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 17:17:18 +0000
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