I tried once to convey to Crumb Crunchie just how monumental Ronald Reagan’s presidency was. While I could tell him about what Carter had done, about Tehran, about Afghanistan, about the Wall, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gorbachev, about Reykjavik and Solidarity, I couldn’t truly get across just how important all these events were because I couldn’t adequately explain what it was like to live under the threat of an expansionist communist empire bent on our destruction. I couldn’t explain what it was like to truly fear a nuclear Armageddon, because he, my son, had never had to live with the Sword of Nuclear Damocles over his head.
And that is Reagan’s legacy. That is why I revere him (and Thatcher and John Paul II) so much. The simple fact that my children can’t understand the world we once trembled in. Because they have lived free from that fear. The world that we grew up in, a world under the threat of Soviet domination, if not outright annihilation, is as alien to them as a world without it was to us then.
And for that may God, in His infinite glory, bless Ronald Wilson Reagan.