There are a few moments of my life that will forever mark my brain... one was walking on the moon. The possibilities. Man on the Moon!
The world (not just the USA) would never be the same again. If we could do that, we could do anything!
The other was the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
I was SOO excited, I cried for hours that day.
As a young teen, I visited Berlin when the first (original) wall was being replaced. To get to/from Berlin, we rode a train that had to travel only at night, with all lights out. The train was flanked on both sides by east german guards with orders to shoot at any movement they could see. (This was to help prevent people from trying to escape East Germany and for the visitors to not be able to see the East German countryside) Of course we peeked out to see the guards/guns. Dangerous and so exciting, it was very stupid too. We could have been shot dead. The original Berlin wall was made up of homes, churches, businesses with doorways and windows closed with bricks. Streets and yards between buildings had make-shift brick or barricades. Lives had been stopped overnight. You could see that immediate and destructive separation in the original wall surfaces. We saw the new clean concrete wall going up in it's place. Looked like a prison wall, with barbed wire. We saw the mine fields and the guards with guns trained to shoot anyone trying to escape to the west side of the wall. Prison. People that had been free, living an ordinary life. They were doing ordinary things: going to work, eating meals. Suddenly they were divided from family, friends, home, work, because they were stuck on whichever side of the city they were in when the barricades were put up. I was just an American visiting the wall a few years after it was put up. I was not separated from my family. But the wall still impacted my life. Just 3 hours after we visited one viewing post along the wall, a man was shot and killed trying to escape. I learned a valuable lesson about what CAN happen when a government does not allow freedoms. I never thought I would see that horrible wall come down in my lifetime.