I was 9 when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember seeing it on the TV - the people in the streets of Berlin, traffic at a standstill, people standing/sitting on VW Bugs, standing on the wall, champagne flowing. I was in third grade; the significance of the scenes were, more or less, lost on me at the time. It wasn't until high school that I really had an idea of what had been going on.
Today I realized that most if not all of my student workers were born after the Wall fell. Communist Eastern Europe was gone by the time they were in third grade. The Soviet Union was already gone; Czechoslovakia had split; Yugoslavia had broken up. Instead, they have 9/11 as their grade school historical reference point.
I guess some kids get JFK's assassination for their grade school memories, and some get the man on the moon.
I think I'm glad I got the one I did.
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