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Write a letter to a relative in response to Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down this Wall Speech."

For this writing assignment, I would focus on the message of hope that Ronald Reagan is giving to the people of East Berlin and East Germany.  He is giving them confidence that the United States is still their friend, as it was when John F. Kennedy gave the speech over twenty years ago.  He assures the people that the Berlin Wall will come down in the near future. Reagan challenges his counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev to take action and remove the barrier.  Another reason for hope in the speech is how Reagan discusses how the two superpowers are working to eliminate the threat of nuclear warfare.


A surprising part of the speech that I see is the stark difference between the West and East.  Consider this part of the speech:



In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind--too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself.



Despite the harsh rhetoric of the former Soviet leader Khrushchev, the West seems to be prospering while the East must deal with shortages of basic necessities.  

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