Lift Up Your Hearts!

Where were you 20 years ago today?

My own journal entry is remarkably filled with the mundane details of life with two young children.  There is one exclamatory sentence, "Would that every day could be like this!" but it was referring to Heather's having awakened with her alarm clock, showered, dressed, made her bed, cleaned her room and finished all her chores before school.  Not as momentous as events on the other side of the world, but a personal triumph.

I chronicled the minutia of my own work: volunteering at the local middle school, sewing patches on our Indian Princess vests, making Bay Punch, and writing letters.  I mentioned Porter and Janet's Indian Princess meeting in the evening.  There was even the recurring whine about school, in this case my frustration with Heather's fifth-grade teacher, who, I thought, was putting undue restrictions on the books the children were allowed to read in class.

Mrs. C. responded to my letter, and the response was not at all what I had hoped.  She praised the required books as “Sunshine State Young Readers Award” winners (which means little more than that a lot of kids voted that they liked the books) and defended restricting the kids to those books during English reading time, “because I then can control what books the students are reading, feeling confident they are reading from an approved list.”  I don’t object to her wanting to have some control over the reading the kids do in school, but I do object to her using an “approved list” without exercising good judgement.  Even Newberry Award winners are not necessarily all good, and there are plenty of good books excluded from each list.  The Sunshine State awards are heavily biased toward modern books; I don’t believe a deceased author has a change of winning.  Perhaps Mrs. C. really does think that astral projection and high school romances are good topics for fifth graders to read about, but I’d rather hope it isn’t so.  She could at least admit that Little Women, Robin Hood, and similar books are also good reading, but she will not include those in her “approved” reading.  Even Heather is frustrated by this; she is beginning to be able to tell a junk-food book when she reads one.  We talked about it a bit; perhaps she will become frustrated enough to be willing to “play the game.”  She can pick out an “approved” book to read for the restricted 10 minutes, then set it aside until the next day and spend the other reading times with a more appropriate book.  It’s silly to have to do that, not to mention frustrating to leave a book in the middle, but it may be the only way.

Only at the end of my entry did I mention the momentous occasion of the day, and my reaction was characteristically subdued.  When something almost too horrible to think about has been a given for most of your life, it is hard to believe that change is really happening.  Unlike Porter, I had not been through Checkpoint Charlie with all its horrors, but I remembered well the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and feared that Eastern Europe's new freedoms would be short-lived.

Today the East German government announced that its citizens were free to travel to any country, whenever they want to.  This is the most remarkable news I ever expected to hear.  It is in the government’s best interest; the only way they can reasonably slow the exodus of East Germans through the recently more relaxed borders of other East European countries is to give some assurance that things may be getting better at home.  But the East German government has not been known for being reasonable, and they could have started building walls between their country and the others.  Let us hope that “hardliners” in the USSR and other Communist countries don’t get so fed up with reforms that they take over to “save” their countries.  Except for Albania, I expected East Germany to be the last country to reform.

The next day I wrote, "I wish I knew what K. and G. are thinking.  How exciting to be in Germany (and within sight of the border) in these times.  People are dancing on top of the Berlin Wall."   There were friends of ours who were on sabbatical in Germany.  For Christmas that year, they gave each girl a piece of the Berlin Wall.  They were, and maybe still are, too young to fully appreciate the significance of those gifts, more precious in their own way than moon rocks.

It is the gift, and curse, of each younger generation, not to appreciate the horrors that have gone before.  CNN's report on today's upcoming festivities was clearly written by someone for whom the events remembered are mere history.  The human face of what East Germany was like with the wall in place is completely missing in the report.

[German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, the first former East German to lead the reunified country, will join former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a symbolic walk through the point where the first people crossed the Wall on the night of November 9, 1989.

It's a shame Ronald Reagan can't join them: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"