Last night I was feeling nostalgic, so watched some of the CNN decades series, the one produced by Tom Hanks. We saw a few eps from the Eighties & Nineties series in particular, since that's the decades SO & I came of age.

One of the episodes we watched was on the Reagan years & the end of the Cold War. I remember being a kid & being aware of the threat of nuclear war if tensions between the US & USSR boiled over. I also remember my age cohort got waaaaay cynical because of that.

Like we knew the adults on the planet weren't really adulting, it might cost the world its existence, & there was nothing we could do to stop it because we were just children.

I remember seeing stories on the news about the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Bloc nations, but I didn't really grasp the details.

I do remember when the Berlin Wall fell. I was in college when that happened. The USSR collapsed not long afterwards. It was pretty amazing to watch, because all of a sudden our global enemy was just... gone.

& of course, it wasn't really 'all of a sudden', it took months & years of pushback & protest & pressures of all kinds to finally bring the USSR down.

The Berlin Wall coming down tho', that was one of those pinnacle moments, a singular point in time at which everything pivoted. We watched in real time as an entire nation *fell*.

Without a war, too, that was an amazing thing. Not without violence, but without *war*.

It dawned on me that, for decades, the USSR had served as a means of defining what the US was *not*.

Positioning the USSR this way was part of the US' cultural & political identity for decades. & suddenly that was gone.

It isn't that ppl in the US hadn't turned on one another: of course we have. So many of our internal problems, then & now, are about conflict between different groups: racism, sexism, classism, etc. But for decades, we had an *external* enemy that politicians could use to 'unite' us: 'we're Americans & they're not'.