1989

Before November 2009 ends I wanted to mention what I remembered 20 years ago. Back in high school I planned with a friend of mine to visit Germany when we graduated and we talked about traveling to Berlin, surrounded by communist East Germany. I don't remember noticing any news reports about the growing demonstrations from Leipzig in East Germany. But I clearly remember a night in November of the news reports and video of crowds of people crossing from East Germany, climbing onto the wall, then the wall being sledgehammered. The morning after the first news report I bought a newspaper before going to school and read the paper when I could at school. I remember wondering if Germany would become unified again or if the Soviets would invade and crack down, and if that would finally escalate into WWIII. I had no idea that it would spread so quickly and a short while later, spring 1990, I was reading a newspaper before class that announced Lithuania succeeding from the Soviet Union. Then of course the Soviet Union collapsed not long after that and the cold war ended. I was amazed; the powerful Soviet Union, our biggest threat, was gone so quickly. I have heard Europeans criticize this, that it all happened too quickly and didn't give time for people to adjust and so on. But I can't help thinking how glad I was that, after having the threat of total destruction from nuclear war hanging over us my entire life, the war was finally over. With that kind of threat the best thing we could do was end it as soon as possible and the worst thing we could do is end up in that kind of situation again.