20 years ago today

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down after serving for 28 years as a harsh and sometimes deadly symbol of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

I was senior in high school at the time, and I am happy that I was old enough and mature enough to appreciate at the time, the significance of what was occurring.

As I watched the images of people taking sledgehammers to the wall as other people climbed over it, I harkened back to a speech that President Ronald Reagan had given in front of the Wall over two years earlier, just a week after I had finished my freshman year of high school. Reagan had said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

In the book Treason by Ann Coulter, she talks about Reagan's famous line where he slapped down the gauntlet and presented this moral challenge to Gorby. She talks about the fits and cases of the vapors that were experienced by bureaucrats within our State Department after they tried over and over to convince Reagan NOT to say those famous six words. Reagan said them anyway, and two-and-a-half years later, his challenge was carried out; not because Gorby wanted to, but because he had to.

How interesting it is that 20 years after eastern Europeans rejected their communist masters, and several formerly hardcore socialist countries began to question the wisdom of the overwhelming role of government in their lives, the people of the United States have elected the most socialistic, left-wing government in our country's history. The good news is that quite often, these socialistic politicians - both our president and congresscritters - got elected by portraying themselves as more conservative. Now that many of these charlatans' true beliefs have been reflected by their actions rather than their words, it will be interesting next year and in 2012 to see how much their actions will catch up with them and if they will be rejected by a traditionally center-right electorate.

I will never forget the images I saw on my TV screen on November 9, 1989 and what they meant toward solidifying in so many peoples' minds the failure of communism and statism. The images serve as a lasting reminder that can be shown to anyone who has any allusions that communism or socialism is something that could actually work.

Good Day to You, Sir