Down with walls

"Within our lifetime the Berlin Wall became a symbol of repression in a class with the Russian gulags and the United States internment camps," contributing editor George Vukelich writes in his column, North Country Notebook. "Over the years, many people were killed trying to escape the oppression the Berlin Wall symbolized. Yet here, on a fall day in 1989, people were standing atop that hated symbol while their countrymen flowed and ebbed from East to West like a river in flood.... The unthinkable has become thinkable. The impossible has become not only possible, but a reality. The wall has been breached in Berlin. If it can be breached there, it can be breached in Salvador, in Honduras, in Guatemala, in the United States of America. Walls can be breached anywhere. Let us give thanks." Vukelich dies in 1995, and is missed.