In 1989, I had a 12-inch black-and-white RCA television that sat on top of the bookcase in my apartment. One day in early November, I turned the knob to “on” and viewed images that forever changed how I understood the world. I witnessed people standing on top of the Berlin Wall in Germany, destroying it with sledgehammers as they sang, cheered, drank and celebrated. I saw people driving cars and walking through previously guarded gates, laughing, crying and eager to reunite with family and friends they had not seen for decades. On that day, as I watched people my age dancing on the Berlin Wall, I realized that it was people who created the policies and practices that separated and divided the world, and ultimately it was people who could change those policies and overcome their differences.
A man sits atop the wall near the Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 10, 1989, as he chisels a piece of the wall that divided East and West Berlin. Thousands of East Berlin citizens crossed over after the border opened, unifying East and West Germany. Jockel Finck/Associated Press, File
The Berlin Wall coming down was not the only notable event that occurred in 1989, so perhaps it was the momentum and scope of the changes that culminated with the wall’s razing that fueled my emerging social consciousness and cautious sense of hope. On April 21, students began protests in Tiananmen Square. On Aug. 15, F.W. de Klerk became the last state president of South Africa, and his government eventually dismantled apartheid and introduced universal suffrage. De Klerk met with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela in December, and Mandela was freed a few months later after serving 27 years of a life sentence. In late November, the Velvet Revolution brought a nonviolent transition of power to Czechoslovakia. On Dec. 29, Václav Havel was elected president. Throughout 1989, perestroika and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy reshaped the Soviet Union geographically, economically and socially.
Yet I was not completely naïve. I also understood that in spite of these changes, which seemed hopeful, people could still be responsible for some of the worst horrors and atrocities toward one another. The year 1989 was not an exception. On Jan. 17, a 24-year-old gunman opened fire at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, killing five children between the ages of 6 and 9 and injuring 32 people before taking his own life. This was the deadliest school shooting in the 1980s. On March 9, American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS, and by the end of the year, the number of AIDS cases in the United States reached 100,000. Although a National Commission on AIDS was established by Congress in September and resources were finally being directed toward the crisis, the suffering inflicted on AIDS victims after years of fear, discrimination, blaming the victims and government inaction was unconscionable. On March 24, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker struck Prince William Sound’s Bligh Reef near Alaska and, in part because of inaction, spilled 10.8 million gallons of crude oil, one of the most devastating environmental disasters caused by humans.
What 1989 taught me was that people collectively are responsible for change, and that change can be for the common good or our mutual demise. This understanding stays with me to this day as I think about the significant problems we face in our society. We have important choices to make about how we wish to live together in this world, and the pathways of the past and present, while connected, are not irreversible.
I will always hold hope that people, like those dancing on the Berlin Wall in 1989, play a significant role in transforming society, and I will always remain committed to education as a primary force for informed and constructive change. This is why I am an educator. As Nelson Mandela reminded us, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” I completely agree.
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