The view from Checkpoint Charlie

I lived in what was then West Germany in the early 1980s. I lived near the East German border during the final, terrifying years of serious US-Soviet confrontation.

My attic bedroom used to shake as waves of American attack helicopters passed overhead. As teenagers, we would drive to the border and flash our headlights at the East German guards, just to rile them up.

Sort of the Cold War equivalent of cow tipping.

Because that decades-long standoff ended without a Big Bang, we forget how grim and bleak and potentially catastrophic those years were.

And because we overlook what was essentially a peaceful resolution (we prefer our popular history to involve Antietams and D-Days), we overlook our capacity for amazing change.

These days, when I hear people on the right talk in hyperbolic terms about the war on terror - or people on the left talking about apocalyptic climate change -- I think it's important to remember how things looked from Checkpoint Charlie a quarter century ago.

The world was perched at the edge of a cliff. Permanent nuclear winter was a serious possibility, should war break out. It was a given that tens of millions of people would live under a permanent Soviet dictatorship.

People were convinced that the divides between nations and ideologies were intractable. These were problems that couldn't be solved.

(We felt the same way about South Africa and Ireland. We told ourselves those were "permanent" problems...)

It turns out our capacity for progress and sanity and collaboration are at least as powerful as our penchant for hatred and destruction.

Which is the real reason the Berlin Wall came down. And it's a hopeful thing to contemplate where the next Berlin Wall might be.

Jerusalem? Kabul? Beijing? Khartoum?