20 years ago today the Berlin Wall began to fall due to a misspoken note during a press conference.

I can pretty vividly remember Nov. 9th, 1989 because it was the first time I ever realized I was watching history as it was actually unfolding.  Sure I had seen other major news events happen during my 18 years on Earth, but this was the first one that I had ever seen live, and I knew for sure it was something that would be written in history books for years to come.

You can read the sequence of events for yourself of how the fall of the wall came about, and honestly it’s more fun to go read it for yourself because it is so crazy that you have to absorb it all.  However, going back to that night in 1989, no one knew what was happening: not the media, not those of us at home, pretty much everyone was in the dark as to why East Berliners were standing on top of the wall without being shot.  West Berliners were taking sledgehammers to the wall and no one was stopping them.  It was like the world had gone mad and no one knew what was happening, for all we knew at that moment it was spontaneous.

It took days to sort out, and the media was still scrambling because even the Central Intelligence Agency at the time had been caught off guard.  Absolutely no one knew it was coming … it just happened, and there was something in that that made it even more beautiful.  You saw families reuniting that hadn’t seen each other in ages if ever, complete strangers hugging as a country reunited, you saw the first chinks in the armor of the eastern bloc nations, and it was a sight to behold.

This past August I visited the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum with the Diabolical Miss M, and in the very last room on the tour, they have an actual slab of the Berlin wall standing there with the graffiti covered Western side facing you.  it is understandably protected by Plexiglas, but yet there was still a part of you that wanted to touch it.  This cement monolith had once been one of the greatest signs of oppression in the history of the world, but yet here it stood tattered, chunks missing, graffiti tags all over it, somehow it didn’t seem real any more or that it could have ever been something people feared.  Now it is just a sad chunk of cement in a museum.  It’s power was gone, but it certainly served as a reminder.

While other history making moments have happened since Nov. 9th, 1989, I know it will be one of those things that lives with me until the day I die.