The Wall: 1989-2009

In November 1989 I slurped pink penicillin for the first time. Just days before, I turned 10 and was celebrating my birthday fighting a nasty case of some kind of bacterial infection. I remember waking up in the middle of the night stricken by fever dreams of angry ninja turtles in my room.

Fortunately, I had a mini black and white television with dials that clicked into a few UHF and VHF channels, most of which was white noise. A real luxury at the time. On that Saturday night, I clicked to Peter Jennings standing in front of a crowd of ecstatic Berliners tearing down the Berlin Wall. Even as a kid, I got a sense of this paradigm shift. I belong to the last generation to grow up with the Cold War. It wasn't duck and cover and bomb shelters – it was Rush N' Attack, it was Rocky IV, it was "American Soviets," it was good guys versus bad guys. From what I was told, the bad guys were finally losing and we had won.

The June elections in Poland, the exodus of Hungarians and Czechs westward on sealed trains, and Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika -- an ill-fated attempt to revive Leninism -- really helped spark the 1989 revolutions. But as far as tangible symbols go, the Wall was it. Chipping down the concrete in Berlin was followed by the televised execution of Ceausescu in Bucharest, on Christmas Day and later the tearing down of Felix Dzerzhinsky's statue in Moscow. Tangible signs broadcast on television.

In December 1991, one of my chores was recycling the newspapers. I remembered seeing the headline that the Soviet Union was done, then tossing the newspaper into the bin with blackened fingerprints. Soon, us kids were sending in for znachki and patches in plastic cases -- unwanted Soviet symbols -- with 50 cents and 1 proof of purchase of Barq's root beer.

There are still walls dividing Cyprus and Korea. A Wall has just been strengthened between Mexico and the U.S. – the Crystal Frontier, the Tortilla Curtain. The Schengen expansion last year has created another dividing line in a Europe of four different classes – between fourth-tier Ukrainians, third-tier Romanians, second-tier Poles and first-tier Germans. Sadly we haven't learned much.

Russians remain bitter, longing for their defeated superpower status. Vasily Likhachev in an op-ed last month bitterly warned of constructing new Berlin Walls in Europe. But instead of calling for greater recognition of global divisions, he instead blamed Poland, Georgia and Baltic states as the "main instigators of this division and antagonism," countries that "under the patronage of the United States" are "actively cultivating Russophobia to give the United States the upper edge in the game." He goes on to describe Russophobia has the "political AIDS of the 21st century."

As president of a resurgent Russia, Vladimir Putin said that the fall of the Soviet Union was the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century,” a fall that began with the Wall's demise. In a documentary released this week, Putin revealed his feelings as the Wall came down as he served as a KGB officer in Dresden. Putin said, "I was told that nothing could be done without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent." While in the film Putin admits that the end of East Germany was inevitable, he acknowledged that his own country was disappearing.

For myself, it is a cause of celebration. I've been to Fulton, Missouri in my home state where the Wall stands as a memorial. I've paid homage at the chunks in DC and New York. On one cold November weekend two years ago, I took the tour of the remaining wall slabs in Berlin. I can remember standing by the Wall, but there were no guards shooting above our heads at the Death Strip. The old Stasi headquarters was silent. The memorials remain, but the Berliners do not live entirely in the past. Walking near Alexanderplatz and Rosa Luxemburg Straße in the former Soviet sector, it was getting colder, so I had to warm up by going into a brewery to enjoy some of the best dunkelweiß I've ever had.