I knew there was something I wanted to post back on the 9th

[womzilla]

For several years, my sister worked at a white-shoe law firm which had its offices in midtown Manhattan, either immediately by or very close to the large section of the Berlin Wall which is memorialized at Madison and 53rd (not too far from the offices of the not-quite-white-shoe trading and investment firm at which I now work). One year, when my parents were visiting, we all converged at her offices and she made a point of taking us past the wall segment, and we marveled at it together for a few minutes, this hunk of concrete desecration made sacred through preservation and spray-paint.

Then, being the type of people we are, my father and I were simultaneously seized by the desire to see the obverse of the wall. There's a couple of feet clearance between the Wall and the wall behind it, and enough light to see that other face is completely blank. We looked at that forbidding, no-man's emptiness, stood back, and simultaneously said, "And on the other side, it didn't say nothing."

I don't remember November 9 very well. I'd already gotten out of the practice of watching television news, so I didn't mostly see the crowds; I heard about them on NPR. I do remember driving down the highway a few days later when a news report came on--I don't at this point remember precisely of what--and something in it made it clear that Gorbachev was going to let Eastern Europe go without a fight. And I had to pull the car over because I couldn't see the road any more from the weight that no longer hung over me, that weight just waiting for a bad radar signal to kill me and everything I ever knew. "Even the word gone will be gone" was finally gone.

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Yes. I remember that feeling.

I sometimes think that a huge amount of the effervescence (economic and otherwise) of the 1990s, all the way up to the loopy excesses of the dot-com boom, was fueled by that global sense of oh my God we're not actually all going to die in a nuclear war. People who grew up in the years since can't really grasp it, I think--the extent to which we all believed, at least some of the time, that none of us would make old bones.

Plenty of potential calamities still loom -- heck, India and Pakistan could blow each other up and seriously screw up the planet in so doing, and then of course there's climate change -- but they don't have the total game-over, lights-out, end-of-everything quality that superpower nuclear war would have had. Dead is dead, and yet there's a difference.

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

Interesting, Zilla; I didn't quite get that relief from dread. And if anything, I felt it more keenly in 1991 when I had moved to Fayetteville (a significant target in any nuclear exchange, most would agree) and got the word of a coup in Moscow.

But yeah, that November, watching the wall fall down, I was feeling great for the folks in Berlin, that's for doggone sure.

[bix.livejournal.com]

Off topic; I'm sorry I hadn't friended you before this. No good logical reason except...I kept forgetting. I'm delighted I finally remembered. Thank you in advance for sure to be excellent posts!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I regret to have to say that I had my own personal, i.e. in-person, encounter with a chunk of the Berlin Wall at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. But I had the same reaction. (Not that I was surprised by the discovery, having seen photos of both sides of the Wall before.)