I actually stopped by and spoke to this Rev. Bill and a few family members. While I tried to remain sensitive and respectul to the families, it quickly became obvious that nobody down there has even bothered to look at the designs for the memorial. While insisting on the memorial being unsafe, they didn't even know that it had emergency exits besides the ramps seen in the renderings.
They didn't have a clear message. At some point, one of the mothers of the firefighters even asked Rev. Bill what is it they are protesting. It was just sad.
IMO the ultimate goal of the security suit and various preservation suits is to stop the memorial cold. Politicians can't back down on it because so much time, money and rhetoric has been spent on it. The last great hope is the courts. While almost everybody in this forum agrees the memorial is a bad idea, there is no practical end game short of building it.Originally Posted by EugeneNYC
The Uniformed Firefighters are still formally opposed but just not vocal.
Is that ^^ due to the conflict regarding the posting of names, or do they have a bigger issue?
Links to direct info would be appreciated.
If they go and segregate the names of police and firefighters from the others that were killed in the WTC, everytime a contract dispute or negotiation comes up, the public is going to have that innocent little display of honor thrust in our faces like some open wound - never to heal. THEY DIED!!! And THAT'S why we deserve a raise!!
I say, "no, no, no."
Your attempt to interject religious differences as the basis for conflict over the memorial flies in the face of data and experience.
Jews comprise less than 1.5% of the US population. You would think that the overwhelming majority would be on the same philosophical page as the first-responders, but poll after poll shows general acceptance of the memorial.
Why isn't this type of over-memorializing commonplace in traditional Catholic countries?
Why are Jews who want to "get on with their lives" so obsessed with memorializing the Holocaust?
You are trying to characterize opposition to family-members as to what they are rather than what they are doing. That is what is being objected to on this forum - the scope of the memorial. It is simply too big.
If you strip away the politics, this protest is not really such a big deal. The rally the other day drew maybe 100 people. Where were the thousands? Firefighters had bigger demonstrations when the city was closing firehouses. If I felt strongly about how $1 billion was going to be spent to memorialize a member of my family, I would have been there.
I am Catholic. We have wakes.Catholics have a culture of massively commemorating the deceased
How did America Come to this?
I was talking to a foreigner temporarily assigned to New York today. Her comment was that people outside of this country wonder how the US came to put so much emphasis on memorials and has focused so much on keeping 9/11 alive. Other countries experience attacks and they go on. Israel intentionally goes on, trying to minimize the ongoing impact of attacks, which would otherwise weigh on people's consciousness. Why do we revel in our victimization?
Is it religion or something else. The need to recover something for a burial has roots in Christian doctrine. The resurrection of the dead is important. Having something to bury allows for the possibility of resurrection. But Christians figured out a way to dump dead sailer's rather than keep them on a ship until they could be buried. Religion adapts to reality when it has no other choice.
So I'm not sure religion is driving any of the WTC trends, although religious terminology is often used to justify specific actions and demands.
I think of the WTC memorial as more a reflection of the aspects of our culture that give us CEO salaries multiples higher than the second in command. Top movie stars make 10 times more than the second tier. Liebeskind was no more popular than at least two other designs and far less than the original towers, but he won and now he's a superstar. America's top model. Survivor. We are a winner take all society, we swing for the fences. Singles are for people with far too much patience, Silver is for losers (Apologies for the sports stuff). We play lotto's because it's not worth winning if it ain't going to put you on the "America's Richest" list.
The WTC victims are the highest rated victims in the country. I remember a quote from a wife, concerned as the 9/11 death toll estimates dropped, that if it went too low, they would lose their importance. 9/11 victims top our soldiers. They top our firemen and policemen who give their lives anywhere except the WTC. Everyone watched it happen. We watched it happen in numbers that we have never seen anywhere else. We watched people fall farther than people ever fell before. The tallest buildings (well second tallest) gave birth to the greatest disaster. Everything else about the WTC was seen through the glasses of a society that sees only number one.
This is reflected in a memorial cost that is completely out of line with any memorial this country has ever produced. Our press (which reflects our own values) gives more coverage to a woman grieving about a loss 4 1/2 years ago than they do to the mother of a woman brutally raped and tortured a couple days ago. Everyone wants to cover the biggest disaster, be part of the biggest news event. In disasters, 9/11 was tops.
It's not religion driving this. Something else has evolved in this country. I don't think it was part of our founders' values. But it is important to understand because it plays a big role in the way this country works. The WTC memorial is a truly American symbol.
One sad part of all of this circus that has evolved is that simple, human respect for those who died and those who lost a loved one has become hidden in agendas pushed with grand statements and posturing for the press. The WTC memorial is a statement on the loss of our simple and beautiful humanity.
Last edited by davestanke; March 16th, 2006 at 01:06 AM.
Well said ^^
Many good points.
The complications only seem to compound themselves as we move on ...
Bad Paths
Thanks.
All bad paths lead to escalating problems, unless course is reversed.
Zippy, what polls are you referring to?
I like numbers, they never lie, but the presentation of them can be self-serving. If Jews make up 1.5% of the US population, that percentage is likely less in Salt Lake City and more in NYC. At any rate, it's quite a longshot for any one religious group to dominate the memorial process. That longshot gets astronomical for the politicians involved to actually know the family of a finalist, let alone the winning designer.
Suppose in this divinely fair and democratic process, the jurors had opened the envelopes and some of the finalists were Muslim. I wonder if politics would stand aside and let the selection be objective.
Muslims see the War on Terror as a war against Islam. So things do get down to religious issues. Not that all terrorists are Muslim, but the focus seems to be in that direction.
The events of 9/11 are unique. I hope the memorial process takes a path that stays within reason and doesn't end up as another spin on any of the current Holocaust memorials and museums.
Just a few random thoughts.
I fully agree. The last thing we need is a "living memorial" or a National Holocaust Museum "sense-a-round" experience. In some respects, the idea of just memorializing "the event" becomes more and more crystallized for me. The aftermath of the event is so fraught with politics - bad politics - and manipulation that a memorial touching on anything beyond the event cannot fail to be anything but controversial. In the post 9/11 world, I wonder if they have pens for protestors already built into the design.
Director of Sept. 11 Memorial to Model Site After Shoah Museum
Matthew E. Berger
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
WASHINGTON
Alice Greenwald vividly recalls touring Auschwitz with a Holocaust survivor, and watching how the woman shared her story with her children and grandchildren.
It was as if she was trying to instruct her heirs as to the kind of people she wanted them to become, Greenwald remembers.
"What struck me about that experience was that in a world that exists after something like Auschwitz happens, every one of us is her grandchildren," she said. "We all are obligated to understand what it means to be a human being, and the kind of people our parents and grandparents wants us to be."
Alice Greenwald, named the first director of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum in New York
For more than two decades, Greenwald has been helping to give folks a palpable understanding of the Holocaust in her work with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
And beginning in April, she'll turn her attention to another atrocity: Greenwald was named last month as the first director of the World Trade Center Memorial Museum in New York, which will commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and their nearly 3,000 victims.
Greenwald, a veteran of several Jewish museums, said stories of the Holocaust and Sept. 11 are both contemporary ones that have a deep, personal impact on people who may tour the sites. She added that exhibits can educate future generations as well.
"Where the two intersect for me in my professional life is in the area of memorialization," she said recently in her Holocaust museum office in Washington. "We deal with great loss here at this museum, incomprehensible loss. And we deal with trying to integrate that loss into our collective understanding of history, our personal history of what it means to be a human being."
Greenwald was a member of the Holocaust museum's original design team, working from home as a consultant after stints with Jewish museums in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago. She joined the museum full time in 2001 as its associate director for museum programs.
Emotions are still quite raw for those who survived Sept. 11, and for the families of those who died. But Greenwald has great experience dealing directly with survivors and families.
"Other museums have constituency issues, but I don't think they have to deal with the sensitivities we have," she said. "We are immensely fortunate to have the voice of authentic witness."
'About the People'
The proximity in time to the event will be one of her biggest challenges in New York, she said.
"The institution will have to be flexible, because the world will keep moving forward, and we don't know what events will re-characterize our understanding of 9/11," she said. She has watched the Holocaust museum evolve, noting that it was built before "Schindler's List" and other mass-media portrayals of the Shoah.
The 9/11 museum will be part of several structures planned for the area where the World Trade Center stood. The foundation is constructing the museum and a separate memorial, Reflecting Absence, that will honor those killed on Sept. 11, as well as in a previous attack at the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993.
A visitor's center and performing-arts building are also being planned. Half the site has been zoned for new office buildings, to be erected separately.
The museum will highlight the magnitude of the attacks, as well as the global response and civic rebuilding.
"You are dealing with a site that is a burial site - people died there. That gives it a sacred quality one has to respect," said Greenwald. She compared it to the Holocaust museum, which garners power from its proximity to other memorials in Washington.
The 9/11 museum is slated to open on the eighth anniversary of the attacks, in 2009. Greenwald said that much remains to be done before then, and is excited to be a part of this "thrilling" stage of a museum's birth.
Still, she noted, "we have to remember that it's about people. There's a tendency to want to memorialize the building, and there is some significance to that. But this is not a memorial to a building; it's a memorial to people."
http://www.jewishexponent.com/ViewAr...asp?ArtID=2754
And I thought the model and parallels would have been to Pearl Harbor or the Alamo -- the rallying points of previous American wars.Director of Sept. 11 Memorial to Model Site After Shoah Museum
Why not just omit the death memorial entirely? The rest of the project would reflect its absence. That would be an affirmation of life.
Last edited by ablarc; March 18th, 2006 at 04:57 AM.
Jews are a small minority in NYC. The point is that the numbers are not enough to attribute the philosophical divide over the memorial to religious differences. The fact that politicians knew the family of the designer may point to political patronage, but not religious conspiracy. I believe Pataki knew Arad's father. Arad is Jewish; Pataki is Catholic.
Ineresting question. Maya Lin's ethnicity is Southeast Asian. It was a very big deal at the time, but people got over it. It seems so trivial now.Suppose in this divinely fair and democratic process, the jurors had opened the envelopes and some of the finalists were Muslim. I wonder if politics would stand aside and let the selection be objective.
Only to us, not to history.The events of 9/11 are unique.
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