A Date of Remembrance.

I’ve written about this in past years, and want to make sure I note it again.  The date 9/11 has been embedded in our consciousness for eight years now.  But, the date 11/9 should be equally embedded.

Fortunately, this year you all probably already know what the date is significant for.  Or, at least the most prominent event.  The fall of the Berlin Wall.  The collapse of the great Soviet experiment.  The effective end of the Cold War.

I don’t think that younger people can really understand what that meant for us at the time (in much the same way that I cannot really understand VE Day or the end of the Vietnam War).  The ’80’s were permeated with a sense of foreboding.  Go back and listen to some of the music.  We honestly thought that we were all likely to perish in some kind of nuclear holocaust.  It seems quaint and paranoid now, but it certainly wasn’t then.

When the Wall came down, it seemed blatantly unreal.  Of course, I was a freshman in college at the time, so much of the world outside of campus seemed a bit unreal.  But, there was no question that history had just turned on a dime.  Assumptions about “how the world worked” just fell away.

There was a brief, halcyon period in there, where it seemed like rational thought and diplomacy had actually beaten out a military solution.  The Soviet Union was collapsing, and nobody had to die.  At least, not until events transpired that made the word “Balkan” a permanent part of our vocabulary.  But, for a time, we had hope again.

9/11 was all about the shattering of illusions of peace and safety.  11/9 was all about shattering illusions that the only way to win was to beat the other person into submission.

Of course, if we go back a bit further, the date 11/9 has a much darker event.  One much more similar to 9/11, and one that similarly should not be forgotten.  Unreasoning hatred destroyed thousands of lives, and evil was made manifest.  I am speaking of Kristallnacht, the night when Nazi Germany turned on its Jewish population.  The government attacked its own people, killing or arresting thousands of Jews, and destroying their businesses.  The snowball was pushed down the hill, and it would culminate in the Holocaust.

I do urge you to go read at least Wikipedia on these events today.  History can turn so quickly sometimes.  Watching the way it turned to both the darkness and the light on the same date for Germany is, I think, important.  To all of us.

This entry was posted on 9. November 2009 at 16:04 and is filed under Miscellaneous, Essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.