wall

The Berlin Wall has now officially been down longer than it was up.  That’s astonishing.  I remember 1989 quite well.  The Cold War that had dominated my childhood was officially over.  The dreaded symbol of oppression had been toppled.  It was the end of an age.  For my entire life I had thought of geopolitics entirely in terms of the United States vs. the Soviet Union.  And suddenly, it wasn’t.  The tearing down of the wall was the biggest symbol of that transformation.