R and J in the USA

We took a tour of the Oklahoma state capitol with a tour guide and two other people. The two others were a pair of long-time friends. One was a middle-aged woman from El Paso. The other was a middle-aged man from Atlanta who grew up in East Germany. After the tour, the five of us chatted for about ten minutes about our travels, our histories, and how those travels and histories impacted our present.

The East German Atlantan talked about visiting Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square. Julie mentioned she had visited Lenin’s Tomb as well, in 1999. The East German replied that he was there in 1987.

Ryan had a quick moment of thought followed by a quick moment of realization. “When you said you visited Russia in 1987, I wondered how you were able to do that during the Cold War,” he said to the man. “Then I realized that, living in East Germany, you were on the other side of the Iron Curtain, so you were simply traveling from one Eastern Bloc country to another.”

“Yes,” the man replied, and proceeded to talk of his experiences of the end of the Cold War.

“In November of 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. A work colleague of mine said, ‘I’m leaving this place and never coming back.’ A week later he was gone, and he never came back. Six weeks later my family went to West Berlin, then to West Germany.”

He moved to the United States around twenty years ago to get married. The marriage didn’t last, but he remained in America, which he loves.

“People don’t appreciate what they have here. The freedoms. This is a great country,” he said. “All the whining, whining. ‘I can’t have this. I can’t have that.’ You can have anything you want, but you have to make it happen.”

Such sentiments are often expressed by people in our country, but they land differently when spoken by someone who lived the contrast. This man spent the first several decades of his life under the Soviet regime, where he couldn’t have what he wanted, do what he wanted, or go where he wanted. He couldn’t even strive for those things, because they were prohibited or unavailable. One can have opinions on his views of America, but the view is different when you’ve lived on the other side of the Curtain.