[Pitchwife]

Cynic? Well, maybe... Certainly a disillusioned idealist, like most cynics.
Don't get me wrong, Mith and Boro - it's very kind of you to care so much for our reunification and the peaceful revolution in the Eastern bloc, and I do appreciate it (no irony). But let me explain where I come from.
I grew up near the former German/German border, in what was called the 'Hof Gap' in the military mind games of the era. If the Cold War had ever turned hot, even on a 'merely' conventional scale, my hometown would have been right on the frontline. And nuclear war was a real possibility in the early 80's, with Reagan talking about the Evil Empire and blithely joking at a time that the bombardment of Russia would begin in 5 minutes, and the likes of Chernenko and Andropov on the other side. I have relatives in East Germany - most of the family on my father's side - , so I'd been to the GDR several times as a child in the 70's, and once more as a freshman student in 1983. I found the reality I observed during those visits incredibly depressing, and I certainly don't mourn the demise of the old system.
When the Wall came down, and the Trabis came rolling through the streets of my hometown, and our relatives came popping in for a surprise visit, I was beside myself with excitement and hope - hope that East and West could now work together and build a better society than had existed on either side of the Iron Curtain before. Rather naive, maybe - but I think we had the chance then. And we botched it.
Again, don't get me wrong. I'm profoundly grateful that nuclear war between East and West is no longer a threat (though it didn't take us long to find some new enemies and Axes of Evil). I'm grateful and glad I can go visit my aunts, uncles and cousins and their kids without applying for visa months before, and have an open talk with them without having to worry that our words might be reported to the Stasi*. I'm happy that they can travel anywhere they want, and I'm positively delighted to see my cousin's son grow up with manga, Marilyn Manson and Peter Jackson's horrible movies. And I admire the achievements I've been able to observe during my visits in the last 20 years.
But 20 years after the unification, workers in the East still get worse wages and pensions than their colleagues. For every thriving town, there's regions that have become social/economic wastelands, suffering from unemployment and overaging, deserted by the young and capable who Go West no longer in search of freedom but of better jobs (and who's to blame them?) and claimed by Neo-Nazi scum as 'National Liberated Zones'. And in the West, the same parties who were responsible for electing former Nazis into the highest offices of state some decades ago still decline to even consider working together with the former SED members on the Left, many of whom have at least faced their past and admitted their errors.
None of this, of course, is the fault of the courageous people in the East who took their anger and hopes to the streets in the autumn of '89. We, the West, failed them. We should have striven more for a unification that really deserved the name, instead of simply annexing the 'new countries' to the old Federal Republic - and that should have included paying more respect to the East (not the old system, but those who brought it down, and also those who managed to lead a decent life under difficult circumstances while it lasted) and admitting that the West never was the paradise as which it painted itself on TV.
Sorry for this lengthy (and rather un-Tolkien-related) rant, but I felt a little elucidation of my admittedly elliptic and sarcastic last post was called for.

*(Family history: one of my father's cousins, an honest believer in the system, worked for the Stasi (GDR State Security). We never met him before the unification, because he would have felt duty-bound to report what was discussed with the visitors from the West, but he also felt it would be wrong to inform on his relatives, so he rather chose to be absent from our family reunions, much as he would have liked to meet his long lost cousin. Shows the contortions of conscience the system inflicted on those involved in it, and the moral dilemmas and shades of grey that tend to be over-simplified in retrospection.)