BREAK DOWN THE WALLS

Have you ever been kept apart from something you care about, class?

In August 1961 East Germany, repugnant in their hatred towards the fascist West, began to build a wall of barbed wire and concrete. The wall was to become one of the enduring symbols of the Cold War era, because it became so much more than the concrete it was cast from. The wall, although intended as a physical barrier separating the two halves of Germany, also because the barrier between their conflicting ideologies. The East, hell-bent on communism, wanted nothing to do with their fascist, capitalist countrymen, and so the wall became an icon of the split of a once proud country.

The problem with the wall was that it restricted free movement. Before, even through their differences, the residents of both sectors of the country had lived side by side, but following the construction of that first wall people lost access to family and friends, they became unemployed, they lost access to commodities. Instead of free access came the implementation of three checkpoints – Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, and only through those checkpoints could diplomats and officials cross that awful line.

And so, for 28 years, they remained divided by the powers that be, until the will of the people, finding ways to escape East Germany into Hungary through Czechoslovakia, forced them to reconsider. In November 1989 the gates were finally opened, and the Germans took hammers and chisels to the wall to begin it’s demolition, reuniting the East and the West physically for the first time in nearly 30, and truly uniting them as a nation for the first time since the 1940s.

It seems to me that the Library of Khalil Longfellow served a similar purpose to the Berlin Wall. Built to keep others from crossing the barrier into his own ideology, as a way to keep his Library safer than the Great Library of Alexandria. But all Khalil did, in trying to protect his precious works from the same fate as the ancient library, was stop others from experiencing the joy he gained from those books. What good is a library for one man, when the world demands knowledge on a daily basis?

That is why, despite his flaws as a human, Monty Straight may have done the best thing he could have for Khalil, for now he has been freed from the shackles of his past. Freed from the shackles of defending an indefensible structure. Monty took a hammer and chisel and with just one little tap set the entire building toppling.

Khalil, take this as a new beginning. Realise that there is a world outside your former library, bursting with more knowledge than even you realise. As the Germans shouted that night in 1989, Khalil, TOR AUF! OPEN THE GATES!

Open the gates to your new world – the real world! Books are not the only thing you need to know to get by in this world.

Only today is your internal war really over.