I was at my grandparents when it happened twenty years ago.  My grandfather was right in the middle of trying to sneak an early ninth birthday present past his Jehovah’s Witness wife when my ma told us to come look at the television.  A wonderful thing had happened, she said.  The Berlin Wall was falling.  The Cold War was ending and we could watch it on TV.

What does a kid know of wars or walls at that age?  I knew that the communists were bad.  I knew the sprawling expanse on the opposite side of every globe colored pink – always an effeminate pink – was the Soviet Union and was full of communists.  I knew the bad guys on G.I. Joe and professional wrestling spoke with Russian accents and were probably from there.  I knew Chuck Norris and Mr. T and Rocky made in their business to bash the living fuck out of every Soviet they saw.  All I knew is that they were the bad guys on every screen and page I saw since I could see, but now that they were going away I was beginning to wonder where they had came from.

I was a grandchild of the Cold War, literate of its products while clueless of its provenance.

As Tom Brokaw shouted into his microphone to describe is as a moment one would remember for the rest of their lives, I asked my mom why there were tearing down the wall.  She said it was because the Soviets had built it.

“Well, why did they build it?”

“To separate Germany,” she replied, as the water cannons sprayed over the Brandenburg Gate again.

She tolerated the eternal impulse of a child to ask “Why” for a few more iterations, but eventually just hushed me up so all the adults could watch in awe.  Without any context or explanation, I remember thinking it was such a silly thing.  Why build a wall separating a town where people were already living?  What kind of jackass thinks that’s a good idea?  Are people who have known each other their whole lives suddenly going to stop being neighbors Boris Badenov comes along with a concrete mixer?

My aunts and my uncles kept expressing their disbelief, their shock that it had finally happened.  That the rivalry that had colored every book they read, every newscast they watched and every record they listened to was finally coming to an end.  After the nuclear crises and the Asian wars and the red telephones and the Timothy Dalton James Bond movie, the symbol of that long division between East and West was crumbling before them.  Each tiny, insignificant chunk chinked off under a hastily snatched carpenter’s hammer carrying a weight I couldn’t comprehend at that age.  Each pebble a boulder of consequence I couldn’t know.

As they swooned to communism’s swan song, I remember thinking how silly it all was.  It made perfect sense to my tiny mind – of course they were tearing down the Berlin Wall!  All the people who built it were old!  The students singing and shouting from atop Checkpoint Charlie must have been like me, I reasoned.  They didn’t know what any of this fuss was all about and it was damned inconvenient having this big thing in the middle of town.  I couldn’t imagine a one of my playmates who wouldn’t be doing the same thing.  I couldn’t think of a single grandkid who would want to fight his grandpa’s silly war.

Of course twenty years and a fairly expensive education later, I’ve gained some perspective to inform the reasoning of that evening, though the history I learned since has proved some truth to that naivety.  It seems we humans are obsessed with the construction and destruction of these walls.

We’ll build one to stake a claim to some land that isn’t ours, and when that’s not enough, build another a few years later and a few miles farther.  We’ll build one so big it can be seen from space, laying in mortar a destiny not of military success but of lucrative tourism.  And we will even wail before the oldest walls we have left standing, even as we build more to keep our neighbors at bay.

It is the way of wars and walls to collapse when the grandchildren of those who made them tire of their burden.  So it was for the Northern and Southern Roman Empire, the Xiongnu and the Ming Dynasty, and the East and West of  Germany.  And soon too will it be for Palestine and Israel and all the other places on this earth man’s walls still stand.

For all those who foolishly continue to build these ridiculous walls, we can at least take solace that their grandchildren will be there to tear them back down.

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