"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

With everything that is wrong with the world we live in, the visit to Berlin has made me reflect on some of the big and wonderful things that have happened in the not too distant past. Nazism was crushed in 1945 only to be replaced by Communism as the primary threat to mankind.
It was 20 years ago - June 12, 1987, to be exact - that President Ronald Reagan in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate, in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, challenged Soviet General Secretery Gorbachev to "tear down this wall". I went to YouTube and pulled up that part of Reagan's speech just to remember what a geat moment it was. Here it is.



Within two and half years, in October of 1989, the Berlin Wall was effectively down. Here is a part of a report from the late Peter Jennings of ABC News covering those events.



Despite all of our current problems there have been some huge successes against tyranny. I hope that 20 years from now we can say the same thing.