The Expansionist

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Glorying in Death. Media have of late focused on the preposterous amount of money proposed for a memorial at Ground Zero, as much as a billion dollars. Yes, that is "billion" with a B. A billion dollars, for a memorial. Preposterous.
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Nearly as many people were killed at Pearl Harbor as at the World Trade Center, but we didn't spend a billion dollars (nor its 1940s equivalent) on a monument at the sunken U.S.S. Arizona. Nor should we have.
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There are some people who, for political reasons, want to keep reminding us of 9/11, and some victims' families who clutch the event to their chests and want to hold it tight forever.
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Life is for the living. Let's just put a tasteful little monument on the site and move on.
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I'd favor a bronze plaque with the events in brief flanked, perhaps, by a few marble panels with the names of the people killed. That's it.
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Compare the monument to the fallen of World War II in Battery Park, perhaps a quarter mile from Ground Zero. No one spends any significant amount of time there, and pretty much no one connects with any of the names engraved there. World War II was a long time ago, and we have moved on. The people who knew those dead soldiers and sailors have also died in the intervening years, and the names are just that: names. So too will the names of the dead of 9/11 be just names before you know it. Just names. All the space devoted to displaying names nobody pays any attention to anymore is a waste of space in Battery Park and will be a waste of space at Ground Zero.
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We can't bring back the dead, and spending too much time and attention on death is unhealthy. Let's just put up a plaque and move on.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,457.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:23 PM

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