Was it the debut of MTV? Is your favorite moment patriotic pride in Mary Lou Retton's 1984 Olympic gold medal win? Was it Samantha Fox's ass-less leather pants? Was it David Lee Roth's ass-less leather pants? Does "Sixteen Candles" qualify as your favorite Eighties moment? Or was it that special someone with whom you saw "Dirty Dancing"? We know you were there. Spill it!
Born in the early 1960's, I was a child of the cold war. The mentality of that era had a very stong grip on me. I had a very vivid mental image of an "iron curtain" which hung somewhere in Europe, separating the good countries (the free world) from the bad (*gasp* communists). So strong was this idea ingrained upon my mind that I cringed in terror when one of the nuns teaching at our church school informed my class that the way of life practiced in convents was in fact communism in it's truest form. I can also quite clearly remember the question that I asked when my uncle was moved from his military post in Vietnam to one in Munich. "Is that in Good Germany or Bad Germany, mommy?" Our teacher constantly told us tales of the horrors of being an ordinary person in places such as Berlin, a city divided by a wall (separating the good from the bad, of course).
As I grew older, I grew to realize the foolishness of this mindset, but the vestiges of it that remained could still be seen clearly in the world around me. Bad guys always have Russian accents,don't they? So, it stands to reason that I was greatly moved by the destruction of the Berlin Wall. I can remember literally feeling a chill when I heard the news. It was the be the beginning of the end of an era. Gone would be the suspicious hatefullness between nations that was so prevalent during the cold war, or so I hoped. There would be friendship between nations that had been at odds for so long. It was a truly moving experience. Alas, we did not learn. We just found new faces to put on a different enemy. Hatred and suspicion live on. Will we never learn?
