The other day, after visiting Chinatown and the Tenement museum, and thinking about immigration and how every new group suffers the slings and arrows of established Americans, I went to the World Trade Center site. I walked there because I’d had too much chocolate and because I was afraid of getting lost on the subway. It was about 30 minutes in the rain and toward the end I merged with people emerging from the PATH, commuters going wherever they’re going, and I thought about how many people must have been underground when the attack started on September 11, and how the subway or PATH authority or whoever diverted trains away from the area, likely saving hundreds of lives from the collapse and flooding that came after.
Walking there now, it’s a commercial district again, the new Freedom Tower (sorry, still a dumb name, but I understand the feeling behind it) is offset on the footprint of the site, the original buildings outlined with water rushing in from all sides, down a well in the middle of the pit. It makes sense not to build on the site of WTC 1 and 2, it’s kind of a mass grave of emotion, but a bottomless pit seems like a poor-ish choice for something like this. Where the memorial does its job is the space around the pits, containing the names of the lost. Each name is included with others from the floor on which they worked and is cut through a black reflective stone similar to that at the Vietnam memorial. That war memorial allows us to see ourselves reflected in the names of the fallen, to make us think how it could be any of us in that situation; the WTC names are on horizontal stone, names carved through it, letters forced through rock, not simply carved out of the surface but reflecting the hole left where the buildings once stood. The list of names is a memorial made up of empty spaces, hollowness where once were people–every one an empty space left by friends and family.
I’m not American, I didn’t lose anyone on that day, I don’t even know anyone who lost anyone on that day, but it changed me, like it probably changed everyone, and it kept on changing me with the disastrous choices that were made to follow up on the attacks, made me angry at the lost opportunity for America to be the light it wants to be, the ideals it thinks it upholds. I thought my feels were done–it’s been almost 15 years–but standing there next to the names of people I’d never met or even really heard of, I closed my eyes, huddled under my umbrella, and cried. It wasn’t just for the people who died but for their survivors, how they’ll always be defined by how they lost their people, how New York will always be defined by it, and how we both have, and have not, moved forward.
Once, when walking a young friend through the first death in his peer group, he told me he felt like so many of his regular concerns were so small. I told him to hold on to that feeling for as long as he could because before he knew it, he’d be back to worrying about all that stupid shit all over again. America actually sought out stupid shit to worry about, cynically leveraging the deaths of thousands to accomplish nothing, telling us that the cure was shopping. There’s a new social contract in America. Everyone recognizes it’s bullshit but keeps playing along, pretending they’re over it, but they haven’t moved past Denial.
GoldenRationalism 