NBC News special report from 1:13 P.M. on November, 9, 1989 -- 32 years ago today:

[demmiblue]

Link to tweet

[Hekate]

1. What a wonderful day that was

A day of relief and high hopes.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. I remember where I was and what I was doing. NT

[liberalhistorian]

3. Oh, how vividly I remember this!

I was a 24-year-old finishing up college and working a shit minimum wage job as a supervisor at an interstate travel plaza and some idiot came in complaining about "dumbass protestors in Germany." So, being a political animal and a news junkie even then, I went into the back office and turned on the tv. It was late afternoon, eastern time, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing and hearing. I really thought at first that I'd entered a parallel universe, because it was never expected that, given what seemed like the iron grip of the Soviet Union, East Germany would ever be given any freedom, let alone that the wall would be no more. I really wished that that idiot had still been in the plaza when I went back out, because I wanted to explain what was really happening. I was truly amazed at the number of fellow Americans around me who really had very little understanding of what was actually happening and just how momentous and historic it really was and couldn't understand why there was so much focus on it.

Twenty seven years later I was in Rapid City, South Dakota, with my husband and it was the summer of 2016, when Slobfather had just been formally nominated. There was a memorial display by Rapid Creek that included a section of the Berlin Wall and a historic explanation of it; it was billed as a "memorial to freedom." Ironic, considering that the state was about to fall prey completely to the fascist authoritarian cult of Trump while calling it "freedom." I took a stone and used it to write "Stop Trump or another wall will be built!"

[FakeNoose]

4. My son was at the University of Innsbruck when this happened!

It was a shattering occurrence all over Europe that affected everyone in one way or another.

[MustLoveBeagles]

5. My grandparents escaped from East to West Germany in 1949/50

This was a few years before they came to the US with the help of a sponsor in 1953. The local NBC affiliate interviewed my grandmother and a handful others who immigrated from Germany about what they felt and thought about those events. When the wall came down I was senior in high school. We had several foreign exchange students one of whom was from East Germany. When she heard what was happening in her country she was crying and begging to go home. She had to wait of course. She later was asked to speak about this in history class. Told us how fortunate we were to born in a democracy and about all the crazy rules she had to agree to follow before she was allowed to come here. It must have been surreal for her to go back to a country very different than the one she left.

[misanthrope]

6. I remember it well

I was tending bar and we were sort of slow that night. Spent most of the evening watching the news on the bar's TV in complete fascination at the history we witnessed.

[SMC22307]

7. What a wonderful post... thanks.

And where have 32 years gone?!