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the 9/11 memorial

this post will probably piss off at least 13 of the 14 readers i have. but it’s what i think, and so be it.

i ran across this quote from the uk guardian on salon today. it’s from an older story about the terrorists bombings at the atocha train station in madrid, and how the spanish government chose to memorialize the victims:

“The Atocha memorial lacks any hint of artistic grandeur. Yet its very banality is also somehow appropriate — for this war will be won or lost not in some grand showdown but in a trillion tiny everyday encounters, like those of commuters pouring off a suburban train.”

as the salon article notes, “there’s a simple and discreet memorial to the bombing victims.”

i completely agree with this sentiment. every time i take the subway in the morning, it’s a thumb in the eye of both the terrorists who want me to be afraid to take it, and the u.s. government with their completely ineffective fearmongering “war on terror”.

so why then are we spending a billion dollars on a memorial to the 9/11 victims? or even $500 million, for that matter?

build a nice secure train station at the world trade center site, and put up a simple and discreet memorial in it.

and take the difference between the cost of that and the billion dollars, and do something constructive with it.

when the freedom tower is built and is full of occupants, that’ll be the most effective memorial anyone could wish for.

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