The Elfin Blog

Last week I was giving my seventh graders a super short history of the Cold War. There was a special emphasis on the Berlin Wall, complete with pictures, in my Power Point lecture. Every year when I try to describe the fall of the Berlin Wall to my students I always feel a significant amount of emotion well up within me. Sometimes the kids notice this and ask why I get so worked up. It is difficult for me to explain, though I try my best, what The Wall came to represent for me, and the West, over the course of the Cold War. I tell my students that The Wall represented the Iron Curtain and more importantly the oppression of people, the suppression of personal expression, and the denial of freedom. I attempt to relate the emotion of the moment when I watched people tear down the wall with hammers, pick axes, and their bare hands on national television in 1989. I was a mere fourteen years old at the time, so I was confused and did not fully understand the implications of the event as I viewed people little older than me dance for joy as brick after brick was torn away in glee. As I grow to be older and more educated my emotional response to the fall of The Wall has grown.

A few weeks ago my lovely wife and I were enjoying some fruit of the vine at our home and listening to music when the acoustic version of Wind of Change (by The Scorpions) came up on my iTunes play list. This song has always had a hold on my emotions because I connect it, naturally, with the fall the Berlin Wall and the associated political changes in Eastern Europe. Compelled by the warm glow of the wine I began to weep, recalling and imagining the sheer joy and sense of hope the people of East Germany must have felt at that moment in history.

I was also overcome with a simultaneous sense of hopelessness at our current world situation. It was as if that same sense of achievement I experience while contemplating the fall of The Wall was replaced by the desperation of our current circumstances relative to the war on terror and our apparent inability to get along with each other. It seemed to me that all the hope and progress that we witnessed in the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were now dashed and overshadowed by the specter of something even more sinister and dark - the blind, religious fanaticism of people who want to kill everyone who do not see things their way. Say what you will about communism or the the evils of the Soviets, at least they were reasonable people who were operating within the framework of the traditional nation-state model. We could talk to the Soviets. Try getting an Islamo-fascist to be reasonable. On top of that, there are 50 to 80 million people in our own country, Christian fundamentalists, who are heading in the same direction as our new enemies. The only difference is a higher standard of living and about fifty years of oppression.

I suppose I am saying that I don’t want the hope and aspirations of those days and nights in 1989 to be lost. I hope that the same seemingly insurmountable problems of the Cold War can again be resolved with regard to the newest threat to freedom and peace. I hope that we as a human people can figure out how to deal with each other in a rational and peaceful manner and solve the issues that so divide us without resorting to violence. I hope to one day weep with a new song of hope. I hope that the winds of change that saved the world in 1989 and the early 90’s will blow strong again and save us from ourselves.