POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

What Cost?

My father was a Sgt. Major in the United States Army, and because of that I lived in some not so boring places. For instance, when I was 7 we moved to Berlin, Germany. Which, in 1972 (yes..I'm that old), was 114 miles inside of East Germany and there was this:

  A cold, gray, and for a 7 year old, scary monument to tyranny. It snaked through that city, dividing its citizens from each other, dividing families from each other. It was not designed or built to keep people out, but to keep them in. It was designed and built to force a population to submit to its government. A government not of their own choosing. It was designed and built to force a population to obey when its government decided who should live where, and have what job, and told them there was no God and forced them to abandon, at least publicly, those beliefs. It was the place where I, a tiny 7 year old girl, holding her soldier Daddy's hand, learned about freedom. It is the place, thousands of miles from the place of my birth in Augusta, Georgia, USA, where I learned what a privilege it is to be an American, where power is transferred without guns and tanks and the People, when the mood strikes them, can, without fear of government reprisals, speak out when they think it's being done wrong. It was the place where I learned that governments, given the opportunity either by circumstance or by the People, will run roughshod over those same people, taking from them whatever liberties and freedoms the People are not strong enough or vigilant enough to keep. It was the place where I learned that freedom isn't free and that once you have it, it is up to you to keep it. It is the place where I learned that it is in our very core, at the heart of what it is to be human, that we desire freedom. It is the place where I learned that when freedom has been stolen, humans will always fight to take it back, and they will always choose to die in that fight, rather than live as slaves.
What would you do, what would you give, what would you risk to be free? Free to choose your own path, your child's school, to choose to try and fail and then try again?
Would you attempt the things these women did:
 
  Or would you be willing to risk it all, and just run, full on for freedom, hoping to outrun the bullets?  
 
Even the year the wall came down, people were dying to get across it. Across to the West Side. To the Free Side.
 

That is where I learned I was free. It's where I learned what I would be willing to risk to stay that way.