I can't believe it's been twenty years since the Wall came tumbling down. The Berlin Wall that is. I was born in 1954, at the height of the Cold War, and I remember when the wall went up. I was seven, and it happened at about the same time as Nikita Khrushchev's infamous shoe banging at the UN. The wall, of course, was heavily fortified and designed to stay up, and along with everyone else I assumed it would never come down in my lifetime. People were willing to do almost anything to get across it, I remember stories about mothers throwing babies over it so they could grow up in freedom. And I remember sitting with my father (who was dying) and watching it fall. He had watched the rise of Bolshevism as a boy, served in World War II and its aftermath, and could not believe he had actually lived to see such a thing happen.

The Communists' policy (denied, of course) had long been to shoot anyone caught attempting to escape:

"Don't hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past."

Which is why I decided to write this post, even though I don't have anything new or profound to add. I feel strongly about this, and dutiful, perhaps, but I don't feel creative. Sorry. (How many times and in how many ways can I say that Communism is the most murderous system known to man? Or that it hasn't been properly addressed?) If you want something more creative, I suggest pieces like this:

"Twenty years later, we still haven't come to terms with the scope of our deliverance."

That's because many of our opinion-leaders don't regard it as deliverance at all.

The Communists tried to deny their murderous policies (about the wall, and about almost everything else their propaganda machine deemed in need of denying). Lefties here were prone to echo the official Communist Party line, which was not to deny the wall's existence, but to deny that border crossers were targeted, and incredibly, to claim with a straight face that the wall was built to keep Westerners from coming in. I knew people who said this. But then, I was living in Berkeley, a city whose officials "celebrated the anniversary of the Berlin Wall--on the eastern side--while it was still standing." And now we have a president who apparently believes the Russians ended the Cold War -- despite Reagan.

And who says we shouldn't rush to judgment about stuff.

In his reaction to the horror at Fort Hood, Obama, in detached fashion, urged Americans not to rush to judgment about the motives of the killer Major Nidal Malik Hasan -- despite immediate reports that Hasan had screamed out "Allahu Akabar," as well as been known to post on the Internet inflammatory anti-American, and radical Islamic messages. Each day more incriminating information is released about a clear past record of inflammatory hate speech directed at the U.S. military.

Seeing things that are painfully obvious (that Communism is bad, or that a terrorist murdered American soldiers) is the province of the stupid, the little people, the "teabag" people.

It takes brains to be in denial.

That's what makes it so powerful.