Remember...

I remember where I was 20 years ago. I was playing with the old Hammerlund shortwave set in the living room that night when I heard a broadcast from somewhere in Europe. The speaker was excited, talking about how The Wall was coming down. I didn't need clarification. I became excited too. I imagined all kinds of pomp and circumstance that must have been happening over there. I wanted to party myself. A few days later, I saw the pictures. One in particular sticks in my mind, and that's what looks like a gaggle of metalheads (100% denim, the Metallica kind) swinging hammers and looking as if they were ready to tear up that cursed concrete with their bare hands if needed.

I'd grown up scared to death of the Soviets. I remember watching F-4 Phantom fighter jets screaming eastbound over my house on full afterburner... and coming back sometimes with fewer missiles. I saw the photos of the bombers that the ANG pilots snapped on their scrambles... they showed them off in the barber shop... I had read the U.S. War Machine and knew what the triad was, what MAD was, and the precise effects of a 22 kT tactical warhead detonated at 300 meters AGL. I knew about the Soviet political prisoners, the Iron Curtain, the secret police... those people scared me and I felt so bad for the average Joes that had to live with it. I wondered when the nightmare would end, only I thought it would end in holocaust.

Instead, The Wall came down. That was one of the best moments of the last century. I rank it ahead of Armistice day, V-J day, and V-E day. The forces behind the Iron Curtain are responsible for far more death and mayhem than the World Wars combined, but when The Wall came down, they seemed unraveled.

There are still walls today, though. The Koreans have been waiting for their wall to fall. The Chinese and Iranians have virtual walls that cut off a lot of information and box them into to certain narrow behavior. We as free people need to do what we can to bring down those walls. No human really likes to be caged and those of us who can freely act need to do so until all the camps are empty and all the walls are look like the one in Berlin: a memory, an artifact, an obsolete tool of a tyranny dead and gone.