Figure 1 – Students gather at the Brandenbourg Gate as the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain fall, November 9, 1989. Attribution

I think we cannot let the day go by without remembering a major photographic moment that is burned into our memories. Thirty years ago today, all around the world, we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain.” This is, perhaps, one of those generational moments that define a us in our age, in holding it in a collective memory that separates us from the next generation. It speaks so vividly of the power of the visual image and how it can seize us.

It is an antique image, from when America was great, when we were engaged globally in the defense of liberty and democracy. Most significantly we were filled with the vision of what despots hated the most in us, “American Exceptionalism.”Perhaps we shall be once more.