beingblog:

The Fall of the Wall, JFK’s Assassination, and Two Birthdays
Krista Tippett, host

I was born on the night John F. Kennedy was elected president: November 9, 1960. To be more precise, the election itself was on November 8, but I was born in the wee hours of the night, in a long ago age before computerized returns, as his slim victory became apparent. My father paced the halls of the hospital with a transistor radio at his ear. He was a member of our local Oklahoma chapter of Young Democrats. He told me that I was the handsome president’s personal good luck charm. And so the Camelot president’s assassination is the earliest memory I recall — too early, some say, for me to really remember it, but I know I do. I can still feel the panic of the adults around me and the terrible sense that somehow I had failed.

Two decades later, I ended up spending most of the 1980s, most of my 20s, in a city that kept Kennedy’s memory alive like no other. He remained the unparalleled icon of the charismatic America that had rushed to Berlin’s side as the barbed wire beginnings of the Wall closed around it on August 13, 1961. I wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times when the Berlin Wall hit the quarter-century mark in 1986. By that time, it was 12-feet high — and two walls actually, with a no man’s land in between, scattered with tank traps, its every inch monitored by men with binoculars and guns. It wouldn’t be right to say that the Wall had gained acceptance in either of the German worlds it sliced apart. But it had become part of the fabric of reality, of life and imagination. And what really kept it standing was a rock-solid, ingrown fear — a faith, if you will — that the mighty Soviet Union would send in its tanks if those men with guns ever fell down on the job.

Gorbachev inspired a completely different kind of faith, one which evaporated that fear and revealed the Wall for what it was — slabs of concrete and asbestos manned by border guards, who were human beings, after all, and could not possibly resist the peaceful crush of the entire city of East Berlin moving towards them, unafraid, on the night of November 9, 1989. And so it was on my 29^th birthday that I learned, stepping off an airplane in Oklahoma, that the wall had opened up.

The suddenness of the Wall’s fall utterly defied the imagination of everyone living closest to it. Even with Gorbachev, and the political changes that rolled across Eastern Europe in the mid-80s, no one really believed it could open up from one day to the next. I recently learned that one of my great friends and colleagues from those years, John Tagliabue of The New York Times, spent the evening of November 9 watching television in a hotel room in Warsaw with the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was as stupefied by the turn of events as anyone else. I could never have imagined that I would one day walk across a bridge that had separated me by less than a mile from an East German family I loved, but had been an impassable border zone throughout our friendship.

Or that I would stroll through the inner wall and the outer wall minus the tank traps, as people chiseled and hammered out pieces to sell or to save for posterity. Nor could I have anticipated the magical reunion I would have with some East German artist friends in Austria for the Christmas of 1989. I would be there as they and their children saw mountains for the first time.

I hold these memories as a reminder that there is at any given moment much we don’t see, and more change possible than we can begin to imagine. I recently had a lovely conversation, that will air on our show in early December, with Bill McKibben. He and I are exact contemporaries; we were both born in 1960 and in college for the same four years. In 1989, he was publishing The End of Nature — the first book about the then-obscure subject of climate change. As I learned from him, though, the science of climate change had begun to emerge at the height of the Cold War. Already in 1957, two scientists at the Scripps Institution described their findings that humanity had initiated an unprecedented “geophysical experiment” that it might not survive. And if humanity is around to write history in a century or two, what was happening with the climate in 1960 and 1989 may dwarf what we perceived as the great dramas we were living through.

I draw caution as well as hope from the fact that history tends to surprise us. And I think I’ve had enough historically momentous birthdays for one lifetime.

anthagio:

Thematticus (click the photo to visit the install page) is a simple, one column Tumblr theme equipped with a sidebar that can display anything from your Twitter feed to your latest Flickr uploads.

Under the appearance tab on the customize page, you will find the following options:

1. Streampad Background Color: If you enable the streampad music player, this is where you can change it’s background color.
2. Content Header Image: Here, you can upload a header image for the main content section.
3. Sidebar Header Image: Here, you can upload a header image for the sidebar.
4. Lavender, Lime, Salmon, Sandstone, Seafoam, Teal, Violet, Fuchsia, and Steel Version: These are the different theme colors you can choose from. Tick your favorite color and you’ll be good to go.
5. Body Fader: Tick this if you want the “loading” body fader to show up when someone visits your blog.
6. Fixed Navigation: Having this option ticked will make your navigation stay in one place while your visitors scroll down your blog.
7. Fixed Sidebar: Having this option ticked will make your sidebar stay in one place while your visitors scroll down your blog.
8. Enable Social Networking Icons: Tick this option if you want to display the icons for your Twitter, Facebook, Last Fm, etc. profiles.
9. Show Icon: Tick this option if you want your icon to show next to your blog title.
10. Show People I Follow: Make sure this option is ticked if you want to display who you’re following in your sidebar.
11. Small Show People I Follow Box: If you follow a lot of people, tick this option so only a small portion of them will randomly show every time someone visits your blog.
12. Reveal Full People I Follow Box When Hovered: If you have the above option ticked and you still want people to be able to see everyone you follow, tick this option so people can hover over the small “people I follow box” to view everyone you follow (not recommended for people who follow a lot of people).
13. Show Archive, Random, Feed, and Mobile Link: Tick or untick these options if you want to display these links in your navigation.
14. Enable Streampad: Tick this option if you want the Streampad music player to display at the bottom of your blog.
15. Autoplay Streampad Music: Tick this if you’ve ticked the option above and you want the music player to automatically play when someone visits your blog (warning: autoplay music annoys a lot of people).
16. Hide Sidebar Youtube Video Controls: If you’ve entered a Youtube ID for a sidebar Youtube video and you want the video controls to be hidden, tick this option.
17. Autoplay Sidebar Youtube Video: If you’ve entered a Youtube ID for a sidebar Youtube video, tick this option if you want to to automatically play when someone visits your blog.
18. Custom Link One, Custom Link Two, Custom Link Three, and Custom Link Four URL and Title: If you need to display extra links in your navigation, here is where you will do that. Place the actual URL in the URL boxes and the text you want to display in your navigation in the title boxes.
19. Tweet Count: If you’ve signed into Twitter via Tumblr under the Services tab, here is where you can control the amount of tweets that are displayed in your sidebar.
20. Sidebar Youtube Video ID: If you want to display a Youtube video in your sidebar, place the ID of the video here. The video’s ID will look something like this “DSXKR8kPdRY” and can be located in the URL right after the “watch?v=”.
21. Google Analytics ID: If you have a Google Analytics account to track your blog’s traffic, place your ID here.
22. Last Fm Username: If you have a Last Fm account and you want to display your latest scrobbled plays from iTunes or Windows Media Player, place your username here. This will also display a Last Fm icon that will link to your Last Fm account if you’ve ticked the “Enable Social Networking Icons” option.
23. AIM Screen Name:  If you’ve ticked the “Enable Social Networking Icons” option and you want an icon to display that links to your AIM screen name, enter your AIM screen name here.
24. Facebook URL:If you’ve ticked the “Enable Social Networking Icons” option and you want an icon to display that links to your Facebook account, enter your full Facebook URL (http://facebook.com/xxxx) here.
25. Flickr ID Number: If you have a Flickr account and you want to display your latest uploads, place your Flickr ID number here (you can find your ID number by clicking on the “you” tab and looking in the address bar for a number that looks like this “55082080@N04”). This will also display a Flickr icon that will link to your Flickr account if you’ve ticked the “Enable Social Networking Icons” option.
26. Youtube Username: If you’ve ticked the “Enable Social Networking Icons” option and you want an icon to display that links to your Youtube account, enter your Youtube username here.
27. Email Address: If you’ve ticked the “Enable Social Networking Icons” option and you want an icon to display that links to your email address, enter your email address here. Be careful, though, bots might track your address and send you spam your email account.
28. Skype Username: If you’ve ticked the “Enable Social Networking Icons” option and you want an icon to display that links to your Skype account, enter your Skype username here.
29. Number of Recent Last Fm Tracks To Display Not Including Currently Playing Track: If you entered your Last Fm username in the box above, here is where you can define the amount of recently played tracks that are displayed in your sidebar (note: it must be more than two).
30. Disqus Shortname: If you want to enable the Disqus commenting widget, enter your Disqus shortname here.

If you install this theme and for any reason there’s a problem with it’s appearance, click on “reset defaults” under the appearance tab. If you have any questions or concerns about anything above, feel free to submit a question to my ask box and I will do my best to get back to you.

Mandatory credits are as followed (These people did not help create this theme, they created certain javascripts and or graphics that helped with the overall look. Please do not contact them in regards to my Thematticus theme, for as they cannot help you.):

1. The creators of Cufon @ http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate.
2. Rogie King (Some of the album overlay coding) @ http://komodomedia.com.
3. The creators of Fancybox @ http://fancybox.net.
4. Matthew Buchanan (White Youtube controls Javascript) @ http://matthewbuchanan.name.
5. Geddy Rivera (Social networking icons) @ http://lifetreecreative.com/icons.
6. Engage Interactive (Last Fm Javascript) @ http://labs.engageinteractive.co.uk/lastfm.
7. Joel Sutherland (Flickr Javascript) @ http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/jquery-flickr-plugin.
8. P.J. Onori (Post icons) @ http://somerandomdude.com.

As of November 14, 2010, Thematticus is completely up to date.

P.S. If you like or use this theme, please don’t forget to like this post so I can check you out.