Somewhere in my Mom's home a splinter of concrete sleeps in a velvet bag. Probably it's now at the back of the closet resting in the history of dust and hiding with the other memories of youth and foolishness. A piece of The Wall, broken and crushed, now preserved for posterity, a reminder of man's inhumanity to their fellow man. Extracted from the hand of repression, a mouse and lion story of politics. A relic of the worst and best of us. When I looked at it I remembered the history of the airlift, of airmen stealing candy and dropping it from their planes after dipping their wings in signal to the walled in children. A few precious pounds of airlift capability sapped to provide comfort. Maybe a bag of salt left behind on the tarmac. And I remember the automatic machine gun nests and no mans land. The barbed wire greeting card. A wall designed to keep people in place, to guard a misguided philosophy.
And now they sell chotchkies at Checkpoint Charlie, wear costumes of the past, and children are born without knowing the mentality of denial. For those who don't dwell in those lands, the Cold War and Iron Curtain are nothing but historical remnants as key to their lives as knowing how to build a stepped pyramid. The memory dies hard in some of us. We may forgive ourselves, but we can never forget. The depth of cold went deep into the well of our souls and poisoned the source.
And now there are those who continue to play out the shadow drama of the past randomly substituting players without context, lost in their own paranoia. They can be forgiven, in the past we cultivated paranoia as one grows a victory garden and they haven't learned to sow that ground with salt, but instead allow the weeds to strangle and fester in the fallow field of their mind.
The world changed in a bacchanal of champaign, hammers and rock and roll. I'll still take this world over the old one.
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