Border Crossings.

I was recently in Berlin for a short business trip. I thought I was going for a two-day visit, but in that short period, inadvertently traveled through time right there in Berlin, even finding reminders of my own story in the process.

After a long day-and-a-half of meetings with clients, we wrapped everything up and several local colleagues treated me to a guided tour of the city. Although I had lived in Germany before, in Frankfurt, and had been to Berlin on business, I had never taken the time to discover the city.

What was waiting to be discovered was, as in any European capital, centuries of history—some proud and some otherwise. But what struck me the most was the history of the second half of the twentieth century, which, from my personal recollection and history studies, wasn’t actually lived nearly as romantically as it is now remembered.

My recollection—from the part of it that I lived through and the years of memories I only inherited from the history books—was that of a delicate chess game, where any false move could have gotten us all obliterated in an instant. But in its modern tour guide reincarnation, Cold War Berlin was one carefree cloak-and-dagger video game after another.

As it is currently told, both by our tour guide and by much of the information I read prior to my trip in everything from guidebooks to internet postings, everyone on our side of that history was a hero and everyone on the other side was a demon. There was no middle ground, no gray area, as most dramatically illustrated by the Berlin Wall itself.

It is particularly disturbing to me to hear about the border crossings, which are remembered as heroic acts, valiant and dramatic leaps forward across the stalemated chessboard we know as the Cold War. But the men and women who escaped from behind the Iron Curtain were largely doing it for their own good, not to vindicate democracy and capitalism over totalitarianism and communism. Most of them were heading west to leave behind political repression and, more than anything, horrid economic conditions. As glad as we are that they made that leap, how does saving one’s own skin equate with heroism? The act of flight is, standing alone, a purely selfish act; nothing more, nothing less. Why does our acceptance of their flight require us to glorify them, while we denigrate anyone else who crosses a border without permission?

This dubious romanticizing of such flights to freedom stands in stark contrast to the scorn reserved for the many millions more such escapes that happen every year—before, during and after the Cold War. How is it that an East German craving employment, non-rationed bread and three-ply toilet paper is deified while a Mexican, a Haitian or a Cuban seeking those things in America or a Moroccan, a Turk or a Russian seeking those things in France is vilified for essentially the same selfish act?

This is how my two-day trip to Berlin landed me back in the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas state, Mexico.

I have friends whose earliest memories involve family feasts, beach vacations and snowy Christmases. Mine is of the Rio Bravo, which you might know as the Rio Grande. That’s where I learned how to swim.

In the spring of 1980, as Soviet-American anxieties were yet again coming to a full boil in anticipation of the Western boycott of the impending, nominally apolitical peacefest known as the Moscow Olympics and as the East Germans were putting the final touches on the last major renovation of the wall to keep their happy brethren in, my family and I had our own borders to worry about.

Happy as we were with all things proudly Mexican, there were some things lacking in our lives, like income, proper housing and food and, well, three-ply toilet paper. So we joined the masses heading north and somehow, despite the Beverly-Hillbillies-Goin’-to-Texas look of our entourage, we slipped right on through.

The better part of a generation later, here I am several worlds removed from those memories, now with the luxury of dual nationality. By the modern American standards that we gradually came to accept as our own, I have succeeded beyond most expectations. By our pre-American south-of-the-border standards, I have achieved the wildly unthinkable. We can argue about whether or not I’m a typical case, but one thing is for sure: anyone sneering at the 2008 version of my disheveled 1980 self should think about the difference one short generation can make.

Flash forward to last week and there I was standing at Checkpoint Charlie. Along on the tour, by pure mismatched happenstance, were a half-dozen red state American tourists, there to peek into the past at red state Russia. In conversation with the tour guide, a pony-tailed liberal made an offhand comparison between one wall coming down in Berlin and another going up on the southern border of the United States, to which our red-staters retorted, “but that’s different.”

Different though it may be, the people making those border crossings were, are and will be fighting the same battle. They’re not heroes or villains, just normal people like the rest of us, striving for their inalienable human rights, including three-ply toilet paper.