Not Just A Friday Night Show

20/20. It was the show that I’d be allowed to stay up late to watch on Friday nights, right after Dallas. There was John Stossel and Barbara Walters. We’d watch in my mother’s room and it was on that program 30 years ago that I remember the Romanian coup and the events that followed.

For me, that program was my portal to the world. I saw the end of communism, the Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall… all through that program. It was a great way to calm down after a week of school.. learning about how the world was ending. “Good night kids!”

But what that show did, I now realize is something that different things will do to us throughout our lives to broaden our horizons and make us think. Maybe it’s a podcast or a book or a prof whose course we attend. We stumble on things that profoundly shape and influence us. It can be something serendipitous or it can be something we choose to expose ourselves to.