Today was the anniversary of the speech President Reagan made asking for the Berlin Wall to come down. It was 1961 when it went up, I was freshman in High School. It was the current events of the time. Twenty years later I had the opportunity to view the wall. 1981 while stationed in Belgium I took the trip to Berlin. Special permission had to be made to board the train Frankfurt. It was an overnight train and as we passed through East Germany the window shades had to be drawn. There were no stops in East Germany until you were in West Berlin. In West Berlin you were pretty free to roam about, until you reached the area in front of the Wall. It structure itself did not seem that massive to me but the mine field on the other side was pretty impressive as well as the presence of the armed soviet troops.
Recently, on a trip to Israel I was also confronted by another wall. This was the wall that surrounded the city of Bethlehem. Another structure to keep people apart because of their ideologies and fears of the other. On this day I hope that a wall will never be built around my country. On this day I pray that walls will come down!
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