My wife lived in Czechoslovakia and remembers that night. She remembers being in a small village and there was just one tank and one soldier standing guard who was there presumably to project the image of control.
It wasn’t long after that when her mother and father got permission to go visit relatives in West Germany. They only had what they wore and enough extra clothes to appear as if only a visit was planned and they would return. They left everything else and lost it. For a long while she and they considered they did the right thing. But lately, she’s been thinking that maybe it wasn’t. She’s been back there a few times visiting over the years and the way things turned out appear to be much better than what’s going on here.
What’s going on in America is the other end of the stick. Too much prosperity makes people stupid and they invent causes to struggle for because that’s what we humans are like.
Our psyche doesn’t easily deal with the recently achieved extreme prosperity. I believe we’ll figure it out, but until that happens it will cause some trouble.