Sunday, November 08, 2009, 10:02 AM
In the News, Stop the Presses
By Kevin Moreau

Over the wall

If you weren’t around when the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, you might not understand why it was such a momentous occasion.

After all, it happened 20 whole years ago—a sepia-toned age when Paula Abdul was an actual pop star, Arsenio Hall was the talk of late-night television, and phones couldn’t take pictures, play music or send text messages (whatever those were). Abraham Lincoln was president, those newfangled “talkies” were threatening to replace silent movies, and if you think Atlanta traffic is bad today, you should have been here when cavemen were still riding their dinosaurs on the Connector.

OK, I kid. But it’s easy to see why the era of East and West Germany seems so far away.

These days, with airport security lines serving as a constant reminder that terrorists could be walking among us completely undetected, the Cold War between the U.S. and Communist Russia appears downright quaint. And thanks to the Internet and iPhones and so on, the people of today’s world are connected to each other in ways that would have been considered science fiction in 1989. Similarly, the concept of a major European city literally split in half due to political differences strikes our sophisticated 21st-century selves as the stuff of fantasy.

Or does it?

How far of a leap is it, really, from the Cold War of Eastern Europe versus Western Europe to the Civil War of North versus South? From red America and blue America to the Blue and the Gray?

Relax—this isn’t another column shaking its fist at the state of our modern political discourse. But if you step back and squint a little bit, you can just make out a day in the not-too-distant future when we pledge our allegiance to one of the flags of the Divided States of America, to either the Republicans or the Democrats for which they stand, two nations under fire, with bitterness and rancor for all.

Do I really believe we’re on the brink of another Civil War? No. But I do believe that we will always be driven to define ourselves by our differences rather than our similarities, and that you don’t need to be a historian to see that tension played out on the world stage, in Korea, in Israel, in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan and right here at home.

That’s why the fall of the Berlin Wall remains such a big deal. Because we should always remember that if we tore down the barriers that keep us apart once, we can do it again.