What’s 1989 got to do with it?

In addition to its special Michael Jackson commemorative edition (which is excellent and I highly recommend reading, cover-to-cover in one sitting), Time magazine recently came out with a 100+ page summer edition, featuring the year 1989.

Onlookers admire a mural by Russian artist Dmitry Vrubel of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (L) kissing former communist East German leader Erich Honecker at a surviving portion of the Berlin Wall on July 7, 2009

Through the tangle of world events that year – the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Denmark’s (and the world’s) first legal gay marriage – we realize that nothing happened serendipitously. Ronald Reagan’s famous “Tear down this wall” speech put pressure on the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev to put pressure on German leaders to open the borders between East and West. And from there, the domino effect spirals on and on magnificently, planting 1989 at the crux of an international revolution.

Of course, few knew this at the time. It is only now looking back that we see how that year changed the world forever.

Read more at: www.time.com