I can’t believe it has been 20 years since I sat here in the USA watching my friends on TV as they scale a previously untouchable Berlin Wall. I had left what was then West Berlin not a month before. Talk about the worst timing in the world!
President Obama isn’t in Germany this time—perhaps he thinks that he has traveled to Europe enough for one year—but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is there and appears to be getting on quite well with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (a former East German physicist).
My old Berlin friends and I plan to have our reunion this February,
but I think that an adult beverage of choice should be lifted today in honor of those
who helped shake the foundation of the Wall and bring it down—including, most
notably, one Ronald W. Reagan who, in his famous 1987 visit, exhorted last USSR head of state Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear
Down This Wall.” President Reagan seemed to speak the Wall’s destruction into reality.
It says in the Bible that believers can do that. I just report. You decide.™
UPDATE: President Obama gave a video address for the celebration in Berlin. Appropriate considering present events, but he was unable to resist making it about him.
“Few would have foreseen … that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it,” Obama said.
