Feb 11, 2018 3 min read

Put it on a timeline, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy is closer to the launch of Prohibition than it is to today.

For that matter, the Watergate scandal and resignation of Richard Nixon is closer to the administration of Herbert Hoover and the early days of the Depression than it is to our times. The Challenger disaster is closer to John Glenn orbiting the Earth in Friendship 7 than it is to today.

It can be a little startling to realize that the Nixon epoch is roughly the halfway point between the days of Hoover and the age of Trump, in part because Nixon is still a figure within living memory for many people, and the gulf between what life was like in the early 1930s and 1970s is pretty vast. While our day-to-day existence is most certainly different than it was in the 1970s – Amazon was still just a river four decades ago – the 2010s would at least be recognizable to someone alive in the 1970s. It’s a little bit more of a leap to go from Rudy Vallee to David Bowie than it is to go from David Bowie to Bruno Mars.

And consider the following: Last week marked the point at which the Berlin Wall has been gone longer than it was standing. It was a hated symbol of communist repression, and a concrete representation of Cold War tensions. It had been in place for 28 years, two months and 27 days, its end coming in November 1989 – 10,316 days, to be precise.

Marc Fisher, the onetime Berlin bureau chief for The Washington Post, wrote last week that the wall “was vast, 96 miles long. It was frightening, laced with mines, dotted with soldiers trained to shoot without asking questions. It was also far more effective than any solely physical barrier because it produced what East Germans called ‘the wall in the head,’ the omnipresent belief that there was no escape, no hope.”

Even though the thawing of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost had been happening and the denizens of other Eastern European communist regimes were growing restive, the announcement from East German officials that the country’s citizens could freely cross its borders came as a shock. In an instant, the wall was rendered moot, nothing more than a relic in a world that was changing at lightning speed.

Some commentators pronounced that the fall of the wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later marked the “end of history” and the all-but-permanent triumph of democracy and free markets. That, of course, turned out to be more than a little premature. While old-school communism would keep lumbering on in Cuba and North Korea, other forms of totalitarianism have risen up to take its place. And while globalization has largely been good for the world’s economies, the last three decades have also seen inequality rise and workers who had once been assured of reliable, well-paying employment left to fend for themselves in an environment that places an increasing premium on flexibility and being able to “think for a living.”

The wall may be gone, but history carries on. The wall’s demise also contains a lesson to those intent on building them – sometimes they don’t last too long.