September 11, 2001 became the defining moment of my political life. All the never thought of lessons of patriotism taught by my parents and educators, and reinforced by a childhood filled with 4th of July celebrations, all the carefully chosen books, movies and culture I was exposed to crystallized that day. It was the moment when I truly understood my parents, how they must have felt when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the ensuing long dark days of war. It was the moment when I recognized the focused strength of determination, bravery and faith that defined their greatest generation. Watching the horror unfold that day, I knew that now it was our turn to carry the mantle of freedom on our shoulders.
To date, I remain disappointed by our response, and it seems as though September 11 remembrances are memorials to national grief rather than the call of arms they should be.
Daniel Greenfield sums it up:
September 11 is not the day we cry, it is the day we get angry. It is the day we remember who our killers were, how many have been lost, and how little has been done to bring down the ideology responsible as completely as they brought the towers down. It is the day we remember not to forget. It is the day we remember that the war has just begun and that until it ends, there can be no comfort or solace. The fight goes on.
Please read his wonderul essay, Memorials of Grief, from his blog, Sultan Knish:
It was around the time of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that memorials stopped being remembrances of virtue, and became therapy sessions. The old statues of determined men gave way to empty spaces to represent loss. Their lessons of courage and sacrifice, were replaced by architecture as therapy session, clean geometrical shapes, reflective pools and open areas in which to feel grief at what was lost and then let go of it.
September 11 memorials have inevitably followed this same pattern, empty spaces, still pools of water groves and names tastefully inscribed in row after row. How do you tell the Ground Zero memorial from the Oklahoma City memorial? The Oklahoma City memorial has one reflecting pool and the September 11 memorial has two pools.
There is no larger meaning to these memorials and there isn’t supposed to be one. A hundred years from now they will be nothing more than giant pools surrounded by trees with nothing to say. These new memorials are not about teaching us to remember… but about helping us to forget.
To find a memorial that actually in some way addresses what happened on September 11. you would have to leave New York to go across the river to New Jersey where the much maligned Teardrop hanging between a torn tower at least represents something concrete, even if it is more grief and pain. Unlike the useless winged shapes of the Staten Island Memorial and the Pentagon Memorial, it at least acknowledges that something terrible happened here and transforms into a symbolic image.
But the abstract symbolism is still the problem. There’s an American eagle overlooking the Battery Park World War II memorial a few blocks from Ground Zero, but to find an American eagle on a memorial to the attacks you have to travel 30 miles across the river to Allendale, New Jersey.
The official September 11 memorial has sustainable architecture, but Dumont, NJ with a per capita income of 26,000 dollars managed to acquire and place one of the steel beams from the World Trade Center as their memorial.
The closest to a traditional memorial that tells you what actually happened and why it matters, as opposed to handing you a three acre handkerchief of empty spaces and waterfalls, is across the street from the monstrosity of emptiness. Just turn your back to it, cross Liberty Street and walk up to Firehouse Ten where the FDNY Memorial Wall depicts the events of the day in bronze. You may have to dodge some trucks and search for it underneath the scaffolding, but it’s there.
That’s more than can be said for the identity of the attackers which is invariably absent, except as a crescent that pops up ominously in memorial design after design, entirely by accident of course. But the memorials are not about history, they exist only to allow us to release our grief and move on by expressing life-affirming sentiments in response to this “tragedy” through community service that helps others.
From cries for revenge to serving soup to the homeless at a community kitchen– that is the intended trajectory. If it hasn’t worked as well as intended, as shown by the people who gathered to loudly celebrate Osama bin Laden’s death, instead of sighing at the cycle of violence, this is the long game.
The Pew polls show a steady growth in the number those who believe that American wrongdoing led to the attacks– from a third after the attacks, to 43 percent today. Give the enemy another decade to do its work and those numbers will be in the sixties. And their game is simple enough, remove the actual history and the images of the massacres– and replace it with an emphasis on foreign policy. Mix in news stories about Islamophobia, stir the pot a little and you’re done.
Numbers like that are why Obama was able to win and why Ron Paul is polling better than ever. When revisionist history becomes mainstream, then people will accept anything so long as it sounds good. So long as it lets them forget.
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