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Sunday, September 11. 2011WTC MemorialAt the risk of sounding insensitive, I always thought the idea of an elaborate 9-11 Memorial was wrong. I always thought what it required would be a plaque on the wall of some new buildings: "On this site, on September 11, 2001, 2700 Americans died in an attack by Moslem Jihadists." Perhaps a statue on a square. NYC is all about survival, endurance, optimism. I feel this way for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, in a sense, it elevates our enemies. I say this while having personal connections with a number people immediately touched by the attack. The people I know who lost family and friends in the attack have their own personal memories and rituals, and little need for canned public display. Steyn might agree with me, but I'm not sure. My own memory/memorial is seeing the jumpers live on TV. It is an indelible nightmare memory. A friend of mine saw them there and then. He at first thought it was material falling from the first building. Bush said it: "Evil is real. Courage is real." We all know that.
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Classic New England yankee response. I couldn't agree more. Eyes wide open and brain uncluttered.
What we built as a memorial is just flat wrong. We should have re-built the buildings, only 20 stories taller.
Or as a hand, giant middle finger extended, facing Mecca. "The September 11th attack on America, in which devout Muslim believers carried out the greatest single jihad raid in history, and Muslims around the world cheered and danced in joy over this great blow to the infidel, should have awakened America and the West to the nature of the 1,400 year old warrior religion of Islam. Instead, while triggering a “war against terrorism,” the 9/11 attack inspired liberal America to embrace and approve of Islam much more than it had done before, even as Americans allowed themselves to be placed under permanent and humiliating security measures out of the liberal imperative to avoid the slightest hint of discrimination against Muslims.
These unexpected and devastating outcomes of 9/11 are perhaps the greatest single illustration of Auster’s First Law, which says that the more alien or dangerous a nonwhite or non-Western group reveals itself to be, the more our liberal society approves of it, accommodates itself to it, and forbids any criticism of it. To speak the truth about the unchangeable Islamic command to wage eternal war by violence and stealth against non-Muslims and about Muslims’ 1,400 year long obedience to that command, is to place oneself outside the respectable mainstream. In America you don’t get put in jail for speaking the forbidden truth, you just lose your job and career. This is the reign of fear under which we live. In sum, the result of 9/11 has not been Western self-defense against Islam, but the prohibition of Western self-defense against Islam. And all the official 9/11 commemorations, notwithstanding their patriotic appearance, will carry that message of American and Western surrender. And that is why they should be avoided." Lawrence Auster I hope that I live long enough to see the end of this foolish attitude of moonbat liberals that we mustn't name our enemies... i.e. Muslim jihadists ... as if that would empower them to do us even more damage. What empowers Muslims is exactly the opposite. When we refuse to name them as our enemies, it means they have the upper hand. When we let Muslims build their "gotcha" mosque on the doorstep of the World Trade Center, we have betrayed the more than 3000 Americans who died there, and the heroic firemen, policemen and other Americans who did all they could to rescue them, and died too.
We have permitted teachers of our children to hide the truth from them, as part of protecting the little dears from the facts of life except when it is filtered through the liberal assumptions of the teachers themselves. We no longer teach Civics in high school or World History, so that avenue to truth is blocked. I hope all parents of youngsters below the age of ten or eleven will undertake to present the facts of World War I, World War II and World War 3, and urge their children to look up books about these conflicts in the public library [the school's library probably doesn't stock the books they need, to understand the conflicts, the battles and the hard-won victories]. Otherwise, it can, and will happen again. Marianne Bob - So, New Englanders have their "eyes wide open and brains uncluttered", you say?
And here's proof positive. Well, Bird Dog, I guess what you're saying is that we should destroy the USS Arizona? Too bad, especially after that nice redesign they did a few years ago. On the other hand, there's no question a plaque would be cheaper to maintain, thereby saving valuable tax dollars. Dr Merc:
I would prefer memorializing victories than defeats, when it comes to mass memorials. I know that plenty of people will disagree. I've written this comment over and over and over until my eyes have crossed and have just decided to say what I'm going to say - hate me if you will, but its the way I feel.
I'm tired of the whole 9-11 commemorative cycle. What changed really post 9-11? Babies were born, young adults were married (including a nephew who worked exactly one block from the towers and was married that following weekend at a venue within sight of the WTC), fires were fought, people rescued, hospitals returned to normal, speeding tickets were issued - life went on. This whole attitude giving credence to a kind of permanent victim hood on the part of the United States because of 9-11 just drives me crazy. It is not who we are, or maybe used to be, as a society. I've never been to The Wall in Washington either - much for the same reason. What happened happened - I can't change what happened, I can't make the dead rise again, I can't do anything about yesterday - I can do something about the rest of today and tomorrow, this week, this month, this year and the rest of my time here on the planet. I can try to make it a better place for those who will follow me, but I can't fix what happened. I agree with BD - a simple plague commemorating those who died at the base of a new WTC built bigger and better would have been the ultimate tribute to the victims of 9-11 - and for some reason, I think they would agree. Merc, I simply said B.D.'s response sounded like the classic old yankee/new englander that I remembered from my youth (those from around the turn of the previous century).
I didn't mean to imply that there are still a lot of those around. A native of Mass., living now in Rhode Island, the moon battyness of current new englanders, especially the urban sorts, is mind boggling. It just occurred to me that this memorial will become as much or more a tribute to the islamist scum that caused the disaster as much as the victims and heroes involved. What will the left say when mid-east travel agencies start packaging tours to the site of our greatest victory.
As a landscape architect with a love of beauty in unexpected places, I respectfully disagree. The new landscape is a revelation, as I suggested in my blogpost from a few years back:
The eloquence of emptiness, Part III The dozens of swamp white oak trees added since the original design concept will enliven the space with Thoreau's "most alive...the wildest. Not yet tamed by man, it refreshes him." Don't like to disagree with ya, Sissy, but if there were a memorial to every place on the planet where man was inhuman to man, this entire planet would be covered with memoral sites.
I have to agree with you, elaborate memorials are a turn-off to me too. The memorial that was built after Aggie Bonfire crashed was the first time I thought, "Whoa, they way overdid it." It's out of the way of all the passing student body and rarely visted, just like the new United 93 memorial will be. Memorials are supposed to be part of our everyday life, not separated from us.
Well - I guess he put everything I was thinking in one article and did it well.
I was thinking this afternoon that in 2010, 32,800 deaths by automobile ever year. Of those, some 13,240 were alcohol related deaths - either DUI or alcohol impaired. Roughly 3,400 people every day are diagnosed with some form of cancer. And so on and so on. I guess its a different perspective. I always believed that any World Trade Center monument or memorial should have been constructed on the 200th floor of the newly-rebuilt World Trade Center, right above the bank of anti-aircraft lasers.
Of course, I ALSO have been known to tell a joke similar to this one. An old man was touring New York City with his grandson in the year 2051 and they see a memorial to the WTC. The child says, "Grandpa, what is this place?" Grandpa replies "In the year 2001, fifty years ago, there were two tall and beautiful towers here. But they were destroyed, and thousands of people were killed." Child: "But Grandpa, who would do such a thing?" Grandpa: "It was done by Arab terrorists who wanted to provoke a war." Child: "Grandpa, what's an 'Arab'?" |