It may not have happened exactly this way...

[zwol]

...but this is how I remember it:

Twenty years ago my parents got a phone call from my uncle. At the time he worked for the Federal Reserve, out of their office in Switzerland - well, by happenstance he was in West Berlin for a meeting. Rumor had it, he said, that the Berlin Wall was coming down. He was going to go see if it was true.

My parents didn't believe it could possibly be true, and they were worried that he might get shot going anywhere near the wall. My uncle wasn't worried. He went. It was.

Comments

[elisaana.livejournal.com]

That's awesome! And talk about johnny-on-the-spot!

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I'm expecting my mother to turn up here and tell me it wasn't like that at all, but it makes a good story, anyway.

[kaolinfire.livejournal.com]

Pretty cool. :)

I don't have much recollection, though feel I should. I guess I just had other concerns than "the world", like hanging out with people online... talking with people in Norway, what did Germany matter? :cough: Hmm.

I wish I'd had a better grounding on "the world stage". Some day I may fix that.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

My own personal connection to it is pretty muted -- I remember being excited to watch the news all the time for those years, as one by one the Warsaw Pact nations opened up. I remember how happy everyone seemed to be in that part of the world, where before there had been hardly any news at all. I remember just how much my parents and their generation were dumbfounded and incredulous.

But it was all things happening very far away and without much direct connection to what mattered at home in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Dood.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

As I said to elisaana I expect my mother will turn up shortly and tell us that's not at all how it went, but my way makes a better story, I'm sure.

I was glued to the news for a while, but it felt very distant, despite being a huge, huge deal for all the grownups. I wonder how much of that was that I never had the fear of nuclear death in me, the way they did.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

How did you not have the fear of nuclear death? Wasn't it an undercurrent here, in the 80s?

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I'm not honestly sure. The undercurrent you're thinking of was there, but it wasn't real to me. I want to say that it was a much stronger undercurrent in the 60s and 70s, but was ramping steadily down by the time I was old enough to be aware of it, and it had no emotional resonance for someone who hadn't lived through any of the more serious things.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Yah, it was ramping down where I was too. I might have picked up on it more because I did fly from europe to India often, and airports did not give me any sense of safety.

Or I might have picked up on it more 'cause I'm me & you're you, too :)

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Mm, yes, I didn't fly outside the USA but once before college. Intra-US flights in the 80s had incredibly lax security by modern standards.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

I remember. Walking right up to the gate.

Intra-US flights still have lax security compared to what I was used to growing up.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Intra-US flights still have lax security compared to what I was used to growing up.

Oh yah. Flying out of Berlin (heh) in 2003 was quite eye-opening.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

It just occurred to me that when I was little, nobody spent very much time indoctrinating me with fear of nuclear destruction, because they were too busy indoctrinating me with fear of major earthquakes! We didn't have air raid drills, for instance, we had earthquake drills.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

It makes sense! Though you'd think it was possible to have a variety of drills. You'd need fire drills as well as earthquake drills, at least. Right?

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we had fire drills and earthquake drills. And that was it, as far as I can remember. The only difference was that in a fire drill, we got up and walked calmly out onto the playground and assembled by class, but in an earthquake drill we crawled under our desks, waited for the teacher to tell us it was safe, and then walked out onto the playground, etc.

Hindsight tells me that the earthquake drill was functionally identical to what I've heard air-raid drills were like. Maybe the teachers figured two sources of existential dread were enough.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

(Did you get something to eat?)