7300 days

I believe I have lived through one of the most extraordinary periods of history. I can tell you where I was this night twenty years ago, the night the Berlin wall was breeched. I was in London on business and staying with a friend. We both could not believe our eyes seeing people attacking the wall and hauling it down with their bare hands.
I went to University in a town with a large Polish community. Only a few months into my stay there, I was raising funds for Solidarinosc. With friends we watched closely as the Soviet Refusenik movement gained momentum. We wrote letters to politicians, we supported people who went on clandestine trips to take aid to the families of prisoners. In the early 1980s we could never have imagined that people from the Soviet Block countries would one day pour over borders into Austria and Germany.
Tonight I want to cry. It’s only 20 years ago. So much has happened. The Iron Curtain felt immovable, Communism had squeezed the spirit and the life breath out of generations. No one would have believed that one day, it would crumble and crack, like the concrete walls of its Brutalist buildings.
For me, this is more than just the tale of regimes coming and regimes going, it is a story of hope. Contrast this twenty year anniversary with the thirty year anniversary of the Iranian hostage crisis. The swing to radical Islam of the people of Persia; maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised by that, or the fact that it appears to have spread beyond Iran’s borders with viral-like swiftness. But regimes come, and regimes go. Ideologies rise and fall. Where there is a spirit wanting to grasp freedom, justice, and life, it will prevail. So often it is the ordinary man on the ordinary street living his ordinary life who does something which makes the first crack.
Being very ordinary, that gives me hope. I am watching out for the extraordinary.