Flattener+1

= **#1 Collapse of the Berlin Wall** =



Vocabulary:

 * Berlin Wall** - A wall separating east and west Berlin during the Cold War
 * Cold War** - A war without fighting, between the Soviet Union and the United States that took place following World War II up until the first Bush administration. Ronald Reagan was instrumental in orchestrating the end of the Cold War.

**Summary:**
Friedman called this flattener, "When the walls came down, and the windows came up." The fall of the Berlin wall represented the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the time that east Berlin was able to join the rest of mainstream society (and west Germany) in utilizing the Windows operating system and personal computers (PCs). East Germans could now create their own content and communicate with the rest of the world.

**Current Event:**
[|This current event], from Fox News in late 2009, is actually the antithesis of an example of flattening. On a momentous occasion, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Obama did not schedule a visit to Germany as he traveled around the globe. Some saw this as his overlooking a huge democratic (the government principle, not the party) victory. It caused political disparity in which Americans viewed it from a hubristic view point as opposed to looking at it from a "flat" point of view, which was uniting a divided Germany.

*As an example of the template and format I summarized a summary from Wikipedia found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat. You are expected to create your own.