Ich bin ein Honduraner

Like a lot of folks lately, I’ve been thinking about the wall.

Well, not just that wall … the wall that’s standing between darn near a million American families and their paychecks … but another wall, built for the same reason – fear.

I was just a little boy, barely nine years old, but every day the newspaper was delivered and every night Dad watched the news on TV, and in the late summer of 1961 even a little guy like me realized that “The Wall” was big news.

Even then I knew a little bit about Germany – after all, when I’d done whatever Id done that I shouldn’t have, Grandma Miller would accent the swats to my bottom with expletives in the Hoch Deutch that had been lingua franca in the immigrant community of her girlhood. My father’s generation had fought to win the war and was locked in a struggle to win the peace; in nearly every family there was a soldier who had seen service in Germany in war or peace.

The Wall may have been built in Berlin, but we felt it very close to home.

Almost 60 years later the grainy black and white images in newsprint and on TV readily come to mind. Images of helmeted soldiers, submachine guns slung over their shoulders, uncoiling thickets of barbed wire as a crowd of gray civilians stared helpless in the distance. Photos of rough concrete parapets, searchlights and watchtowers. Films of desperate people racing through minefields, hurling themselves against barricades, only to be hauled back struggling, screaming, in terror of what was to come at the hands of their own government.

This was The Wall. Officially dubbed “the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” by its builders, intended to stop immigrants from illegally entering the Federal Republic of Germany, it surrounded West Berlin with concrete, razor wire and death.

Still, they came. More than 100,000 are known to have made the attempt; some 200 died trying.

They were, of course, breaking the law. It was the German Democratic Republic’s legal right to control its borders, and after seeing more that 3.5 million people slip across the unobstructed border, the authorities stepped in to stem the tide,

There was no question then of whose side our country, our president would take. We could sum up what the desperate refugees sought with a single word – Freedom -- absolute as we were in our belief that if freedom was of paramount value to us, so it was for everyone.

I think we understood freedom then with a clarity that is missing today.  Most people then had a living memory of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 speech which declared all the world’s people shared in our right to “Four Freedoms: the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to worship God, each in our own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.” And they had a living memory of the war fought to make that so.

For generations we, as a nation, as a people, stood with those denied those basic freedoms. “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin,” President Kennedy declared in 1963, “and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

A generation later, another American president pointed to the miles of concrete and wire that stood between the oppressed and the freedom we Americans enjoyed to demand, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

And when the wall finally fell, we celebrated.

We have a different president now. A different wall and different people standing on a border desperately seeking “freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to worship God in their own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.”

When I was a boy there was no question as to which side was right and which was wrong. As Americans we dared to share the promise of freedom, justice and opportunity with all people. We acted out of courage and generosity, not fear and worse. Do we now build walls or, in the spirit of Ronald Reagan, tear them down?

Do we have the courage, the commitment to stand at our own border to declare “Ich bin ein Honduraner”?