![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
9. November
Nov. 9th, 2009 06:33 pmTwenty (eek!) years ago, I was a freshman in college, minding my own business and doing my homework in my dorm room. Suddenly, my roommate's twin sister burst into the room, crying and yelling about something. Eventually we understood her words: the Wall is down!
We followed her downstairs to watch on TV as thousands of Germans climbed on the Berlin Wall, crossing East to West and West to East, in the largest display of euphoria I'd ever seen. In the days that followed, demonstrations continued in the surrounding Soviet bloc countries, including Czechoslovakia, where my grandfather was born and where I still have cousins.
I've lived in Germany since then. I realize that the effects of East vs. West and the resulting unification have positives and negatives. I know that the economy of the East is still weaker than the West, and that the cost to rebuild the East chafes. I get what Wolf Biermann says in his poem "Der Westn ist besser, der Westn ist bunter, und schoener und schlauer und reicher und frei/und trotz allerdem, ich sag' dir die Wahrheit/der Westn ist auch nicht det Gelbe vom Ei." (The West is better, the West is more colorful, und more beautiful, and cleverer and richer and free/but in spite of it all I tell you the truth: the West, it isn't the yolk of the egg/cat's meow.)
Still.
It's easy to look at our Greatest Dream, our personal Promised Land, and think that if only *sigh* if ONLY I could be *there* then the streets would be paved with gold, and all my troubles would be over (in the land of Solla Salloo). And then you get there and realize--the streets are polished with work, not existing gold dust, that a happy wedding is a beginning, not an end, that a book contract is the base of the trail, not the pinnacle, that finding your Life's Calling is the first step of a worldwide journey.But yet it's still worth it to celebrate that spark, that beginning, because it's the chance that makes it possible.
We don't love (and need) freedom because it solves all our problems. We love freedom because it gives us chances. Because it opens doors. Because it gives us--and sometimes forces us to develop--power we didn't have before. Power to change our lives and bless others and make something of the world around us.
Die Mauer ist gefallen. Let freedom ring.
We followed her downstairs to watch on TV as thousands of Germans climbed on the Berlin Wall, crossing East to West and West to East, in the largest display of euphoria I'd ever seen. In the days that followed, demonstrations continued in the surrounding Soviet bloc countries, including Czechoslovakia, where my grandfather was born and where I still have cousins.
I've lived in Germany since then. I realize that the effects of East vs. West and the resulting unification have positives and negatives. I know that the economy of the East is still weaker than the West, and that the cost to rebuild the East chafes. I get what Wolf Biermann says in his poem "Der Westn ist besser, der Westn ist bunter, und schoener und schlauer und reicher und frei/und trotz allerdem, ich sag' dir die Wahrheit/der Westn ist auch nicht det Gelbe vom Ei." (The West is better, the West is more colorful, und more beautiful, and cleverer and richer and free/but in spite of it all I tell you the truth: the West, it isn't the yolk of the egg/cat's meow.)
Still.
It's easy to look at our Greatest Dream, our personal Promised Land, and think that if only *sigh* if ONLY I could be *there* then the streets would be paved with gold, and all my troubles would be over (in the land of Solla Salloo). And then you get there and realize--the streets are polished with work, not existing gold dust, that a happy wedding is a beginning, not an end, that a book contract is the base of the trail, not the pinnacle, that finding your Life's Calling is the first step of a worldwide journey.But yet it's still worth it to celebrate that spark, that beginning, because it's the chance that makes it possible.
We don't love (and need) freedom because it solves all our problems. We love freedom because it gives us chances. Because it opens doors. Because it gives us--and sometimes forces us to develop--power we didn't have before. Power to change our lives and bless others and make something of the world around us.
Die Mauer ist gefallen. Let freedom ring.
