The following is republished from Allison’s original post on Medium.
On Having Your Senior Year Turned Upside Down
The Class of 2020 is in a position that’s uniquely their own. But certain aspects of it have me reflecting on my own senior year…
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The Class of 2020 is about to finish their final year of high school under unprecedented circumstances. Long-held traditions and carefully laid plans have been waylaid. I have some idea how they feel. My senior year was pretty weird, too.
I went to school on a U.S. Army post in a small German town near the border between East and West Germany. The U.S. military’s Cold War-era mission there was to defend a mountain pass that was strategically important: the Fulda Gap. It was there that the Russians would most likely come through to the West in case of an invasion. (Spoiler alert: they didn’t! The border came down and the two countries became one again. Yay!)
I’d lived in Fulda and attended school on the Army post since 2nd grade, and I always assumed I’d have an ordinary senior year much like my brothers did years before me. But in 1993, the U.S. Government decided that with the Cold War over and Germany reunified, it was time to shut down some American installations in Europe — and Fulda’s fate was sealed.
