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Name: LoveYouLive
E-Mail: jsommer221@aol.com
Subject: End of the Cold War (nsc)
Date: Monday, November 9, 2009
Time: 6:02:36 PM
Remote Address: 71.125.65.200
Message ID: 249049
Parent ID: 249029
Thread ID: 249029
Remember the night very well. It was very early in my work career. I was on a business trip in Orlando. I remember being slightly upset as I watch the TV in my hotel room that night. It all meant that I had missed my chance to see the Berlin Wall.
My entire life (to that point) the Berlin Wall and Cold War had loomed very large. The struggle between East and West was not a hot war but very much a cold war of stark political ideas. The political boundary of East & West Germany had been set years before at the close of WWII. I only knew it as the war growing up and the current threat of the Soviet Union in the East. All that would end in November 1989.
Back to my disappointment, it wasn't real. I was definitely happy that night. However I had always wanted to see Berlin and "The Wall". I had even been in West Germany that summer and was given the choice to go visit my friends summer home in the north just near Denmark or take a weekend trip to Berlin. I choose their summer home and some boating. And I made that choice because my buddy's girlfriend made the comment: "It will always be there". How could I ever doubt Uli after her own family had escaped East Germany just weeks before the Wall went up in 1961? Her comment convinced me to wait. As a result my only witness of the Iron Curtain was turning around at a GDR checkpoint on the border East of Hamburg during a cruise on the autobahn in my friends BMW.
What is amazing now is reading the retrospectives. Even in those days Britain and France were against a complete reunification of Germany. Not even all the Germans were for it. However 20 years later we have a very different Europe with many "free" countries in the former Eastern Bloc. Certainly a great moment in our modern history.
Shift gears slightly, I now feel very old. I am only 43 but now I can remember some distant historic events like it was yesterday. This all hit me last week while in China. The reality started hitting me when I learned that I was the oldest person in all my meetings last week. But it was really that fact that made me feel so old. I felt old when an India colleague asked me: "How did the Cold War start?" Initally I was shocked by the question. How could a well educated, 34 year old IT professional from India not know how the Cold War began? He didn't because he never really lived in the world I grew up in. That was only possible because of the events in Germany 20 years ago.
I told him to watch the movie Patton Ronnie
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