Twenty Years After

It's an experience I will never forget. Twenty years ago my parents sat glued to Frontline and seemed to be completely unaware of my two-year-old brother screaming his head off. I asked them what was happening, and they said that an evil dictator was about to be killed on television. I was seven years old, and I didn't understand much about it except that I was watching an old married couple who looked vaguely like friends of my grandparents were begging for their lives in the moment before they would be slaughtered. I ran out of the room in something approaching horror before I had to see the inevitable.

As it turned out, Caucescu was not executed on television but one can hear the gunshots anyway.