RonPrice

THE WALL AND THE WINDOW

The Berlin Wall was erected on the night of August 13, 1961. I began my travelling-pioneer life for the Canadian Bahá’í community in a weekend afternoon in late August 1962. That August night in 1961 was on a weekend when most Berliners were sleeping. The East German government began to close the border. In the early morning of that Sunday most of the first work was done: the border to West Berlin was closed. The East German troops had begun to tear up streets and to install barbed wire entanglement and fences throughout Berlin. The first concrete elements and large square blocks were used on August 15, 1961. Within the next months the first generation of the Berlin Wall was built. It was a wall consisting of those concrete elements and square blocks.

A second Wall was built in June 1962, two months before my personal window of travelling-pioneer life opened. That second Wall was constructed in order to prevent East Germans escaping to the West. That first Wall was improved during the next several years. It is difficult to distinguish between the parts of the Wall that constituted its first and the second generation. These two first generations were torn down when a third generation was constructed beginning in 1965. This third generation of the Berlin Wall consisted of concrete slabs between steel-girder and concrete posts with a concrete sewage pipe running along the top of the Wall. In 1965 my travelling-pioneer life opened up an even larger window than it had enjoyed for three years. That window looked out into the Canadian Arctic on Baffin Island.

In 1975 a fourth generation of the Wall replaced this third generation. New concrete segments were used which were easy to build up and were more resistant to breakthroughs and to environmental pollutions. Over these years, 1961 to 1975, the East German government spent 1 billion dollars a year on the Wall. By 1975 I had travelled, pioneered, from the Canadian Arctic to the outback of Australia. Windows of opportunity had opened in my life but I, too, had suffered from months of mental illness institutionalized inside the walls of four hospitals. -Ron Price with thanks to several internet sites on the subject of “The Construction and Fall of the Berlin Wall,” 8 November 2009.

That Berlin Wall was far-away
during those years when I had
my own walls to contend with.
I was as busy as the proverbial
beaver just getting through the
walls erected in my own life!!

But gradually, year by year, a
series of windows opened-up
giving me opportunities I had
never dreamt-of: getting a BA,
then a teaching qualification, a
series of jobs from one end of
the earth to the other so that by
1975 when the final generation
of Berlin walls were built I was
well on my way into a career of
education, of learning & of time
in classrooms for over 50 years.

From the perspective of these years
of my retirement in a late adulthood
and on two old-age pensions those
early walls have all come down and
by 1989 that one in Berlin was down.
The revolutions of 1989…the Fall of
Communism, the Revolutions over
Eastern Europe: a new paradigm was
emerging in the international world.

And as it did so, too, did a paradigm
emerge in the embryonic world order
of the Baha’i Faith which has been in
my life now for nearly sixty years!!!!

Ron Price
20 October 2010

arthra

Hmm reminds me of a Baha'i Song I heard over the years by the Zemke family:

Building Bridges

Chorus:

We are building bridges out of the walls,

Building bridges out of the walls, (2)

They keep us apart.


When the wall says stay away

We are from a different land

We're going to tell them

The earth's one country,

We're world citizens.

And turn that wall into a bridge,

Take my brother by the hand and

Walk across that bridge

To the world God promised man.Chorus


When the wall says stay away,

We are from a different race

We're going to tell them

This is just one race

That's the human race

And turn that wall into a bridge,

Take my brother by the hand and

Walk across that bridge

To the world God promised man.


Chorus


When the wall says stay away,

Our religion is not the same

We're going to tell them

That we just worship

God by different names

And turn that wall into a bridge,

Take my brother by the hand and

Walk across that bridge

To the world God promised man.


Chorus

RonPrice

I remember that song well, arthra.-Ron:cool