On Sunday we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall! My first visit to a communist country was when I was 19 years old. I hitchhiked on the German autobahn to Berlin. It was 1967. I walked along the Berlin Wall, first on the West Berlin side, and then I crossed over into East Berlin on the S-Bahn subway. Surfacing in East Berlin, I got a “Day Pass” and walked the streets of East Berlin, getting as close as I could to the Wall, but there was barbed wire and soldiers to prevent you from encroaching too far into No Mans Land. West Berlin had been totally rebuilt since World War II, but East Berlin, except for the main street, Karl Marx Strasse, was still bombed out ruins in many places from the World War II. It was easy to see the stark difference between a bounding capitalist economy in the West contrasted with the poverty, misery and oppression wrought by communism in the East. What I witnessed those days created a human rights activist out of me, and for the next 30 years of my life I would work on behalf of oppressed religious groups, first in Eastern Europe and Asia. During those years I would eventually get arrested in the Soviet Union and married to Jana Luptakova in Czechoslovakia. It was an interesting beginning to a life of activism and campaigning for human rights. Today, there are still walls barricading people, preventing men, women and children from crossing the line.. I recently visited the Dimilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea. There is the wall built by Israel to confine the Palestinian peoples. There is the wall and fence separating Hong Kong from China. We are not yet finished tearing down walls. And even where there are no physical walls, there is the horrid man-made psychological barriers of racism, bigotry, fear and hate that divide many nations. We dare not give up. Let’s keep at it! Nothing can stop the power of hope and the longing for freedom! ~ Sam
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 22:12:01 +0000
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