esrosedotblog

WALLED OUT

Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell. Well, it was torn down.

It is hard to overestimate the importance of this step in the dissolution of the "iron curtain". Younger people have their own walls and new iron curtains in the world.

This is a great story. See the video. One man made a difference.

The German people took a bad rap for a long time about going along.

This guy didn't really go along. One man.

The Hinge of History

We had a piece of the wall for awhile. It was a very emotional momento. They were selling them in Boston within a week of the destruction of it.

I don't think it was fake. It didn't matter. It was tangible evidence that the wall was gone. Some wall somewhere.

There is more than a little bit of fate hanging on this as well.

In 1959, I left active duty in the Army for 6 years of attendance at a reserve unit. I was a six month wonder. ROTC. Summer camp, six months and then six years of weekly meetings and two weeks of summer camp.

I never attended one meeting.

I had an "advisor" who took a liking to me. He had a cabin near where I grew up.

A small thing.

He put me in a bullshit correspondence course instead of a local reserve unit. I did go to summer camp for 5 summers with another guy from Philadelphia. We had it knocked. No unit, they didn't know what to do with us. We did. It was a walk in the park. Sure, a walk in the Army base park but still.

He was a closeted gay also. But that is another story.

The unit I would have been in went to Germany in one of the Berlin crises. The crisis was over before they got there but they were activated and had to serve out their two years.

I, on the other hand, took my time with the correspondence course, dragged my feet and was eventually decommissioned for not maintaining my obligation. They had so many of us they didn't care.

It was not long after that, not a year, before Viet Nam started to grind up our young men.

So the end of The Wall was the end of a whole period of anxiety and worry about having my life disrupted by arbitrary power and bureaucracy.

At least that is how I see it.

By the time it was over, so was I. I was into the peace movement and had I been told to go on active duty again, I would not have gone.

I have been fortunate in my life to have been born at exactly the right time to miss WWII, the Korean Action, or any other conflagration.

Labels: history, life, war and peace