Remembering the Lost

This is a rendering of the Memorial Name Inscriptions around one of two pools that will be in the footprints of the Twin Towers.   Renderings of the other elements are posted online.

Select images below the fold.

Rendering of Aerial View.

Rendering of Memorial at Night.


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12 responses to “Remembering the Lost”

  1. JMPrince Avatar

    Yep, and for all that we can also blame the ‘replays’ on the TV & in media, which have haphazardly or directly re-traumatized yet another generation of young too, and cemented & fomented hatreds that would otherwise normally ‘die down’. There were great anti-German sentiments around WW1. These died out in time for the ‘America First’ crowd, (including Lucky Lindy, & many others, BTW) to become popular & sympathetic to the yes, Fascist cause both in Germany & Spain at the beginnings of WW11 in the mid-late 1930’s. Why? Likely Less (realistic) film about or reporting on the prior & ongoing wars, & certainly no nightly TV coverage to remind anyone. Still B/W photos were about the extent of what most folks would be commonly exposed to ‘The Great War’ & other military excursions back then. Occasional news reels for propaganda purposes for general flavor too.

    Now? It’s (9-11) on ‘iconic moment T-Shirts’ made into bumper stickers, silk screened/Painted onto truck tail gates with the ever useful epithet, ‘Everything I needed to know about Muslim’s I learned on 9-11’. It’s the constant images of loss & defeat that angers and constantly aggravates & agitates the masses. And is meant to. Meanwhile after WW11, Britain quickly ‘lost’ her empire, with not much mass ‘domestic revolt’ seen or organized around this tremendous economic loss. At the same time Nixon was starting up his career asking ‘Who lost China?’ as if we could have prevented a Commie take over when they more or less occupied most of the nation. Which would remain as ever commercially useless to us (and much of anyone else) for the rest of his lifetime.

    It’s strange the way we do & don’t compare various deaths from various causes. About 5K will be killed by largely preventable food borne illness in the US every year, yet we commonly can not get this issue addressed by Congress, after more than a decade of trying. Too many entrenched powerful interests involved. We’ve yet to hit 5000 dead in both Afghanistan & the Iraq wars, Combined, in about a decade of fighting now.

    And yes, that’s not an uncommon topic for research too, why this might be so:
    http://www.springerlink.com/content/1l5h341m07175nq2/

    JMP

  2. Juliana Avatar
    Juliana

    Thank you J.M.. I agree.. I’m so sick of 9-11 as a stand alone tragic event that will define us as a nation. This country has got to find better coping skills than invading other countries and looking the other way at events that we do have serious responsibility for.

    I’m not attempting to minimize any tragedy, but all the things done in the name of 9-11 are very nearly insulting at this point. Book burning, muslim hating, limited civil rights, an entire nation that takes for granted that upon entering an airport we’re all assumed to be criminal and treated as such. Come on.

    We’ve bludgeoned the world with our “grief” and yet ignored real threats.

  3. JMPrince Avatar

    Yes, no where near the same but perhaps somewhat comparable.

    1.) Long term threats well known & defined well before the events occurring but studiously ignored by an indifferent bureaucracy. One (FEMA) was essentially quickly dismantled since their more effective reincarnation of the 1990’s. The other the National Security apparatus, more focused in the months & years before the event on ‘other priorities’ including high level prostitution stings in NOLA by the DoJ. Of the top 10 DoJ priorities that John Ashcroft brought to Bush in the day before 9-11, none actually mentioned or broached ‘terrorism’, despite a summer of terror scares & escalating threats as documented by the CIA & NSA. As with the approaching storm, we well knew the threats existed, and were actually extensively & well informed on both. But they were shunted aside. In NOLA likely due to costs, for 9-11, due to more complex factors.

    2.) Further bureaucratic snafus leading to poor or inadequate initial Federal response leading to more & further death, disease & injury in both places. In NOLA the lack of any rescue beyond local ‘pick-up teams’ of boatmen until the Coasties finally got there as literally the only Federal agency who were operational during the most important period of the crises. In the rescue efforts @ Ground Zero, the concomitant lies from the EPA which declared the site ‘essentially free of toxins’ when the first responders putting out the fire for the next weeks & doing rescue & clearing work were swimming in a toxic soup. Which has been denied & un-acted upon by the Federal government until this day.

    3.) The confusion & the further & continuing cover-ups of 1&2 & more for both. And the fact that despite Hurricanes being ‘natural disasters’ it was the long predicted man made catastrophic failure of the levees that caused the most flooding, damage & carnage in NOLA. And despite being ‘unpredictable’ what part of “Bin Laden Determined to strike in US” did the Bush admin not quite understand when delivered by the CIA in their daily brief on Aug 9th? Bush went on vacation the next day. He addressed the nation for the Very first time later on the next week. About a stirring national priority that demanded immediate national attention & action. Naturally that was about limiting Stem Cell Research, and everyone recalls his magnificent call to battle on that front.

    When you get right down to it? Most major complex catastrophic disasters & failures really have broadly similar causes & are indeed can be quite comparable. There’s even books on this:

    Charles Perrow: ‘Normal Accidents’
    http://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Technologies/dp/0691004129

    And we might also mention that Hyman Minsky was looking at the same dynamics in our financial system about 2 decades previous to Perrow’s book too. Few recall that, but it did come in handy. JMP

  4. Sara Avatar
    Sara

    Katrina was 4 years later, so you can expect that memorial in about 5 years. And I don’t think the two situations are in any way comparable.

  5. JMPrince Avatar

    I still say the eventual totals in NOLA & vicinity a year afterwards would easily equal what was seen on 9-11. Which is the usual way of accounting for natural disasters & their aftermaths. How about a nice cartoonish looking statuette of ‘Heckofvajob Brownie’ looking a bit sheepish and trying to mumble something reassuringly but blandly bureaucratic. It would be interactive, too with one or more of such nostrums coming out from speakers in the rear, sort of the fav sayings of the Bush crime crew on the ‘sitch’ as it happened. Coming from deep in the bowels, where their hearts always are. Now that would make an impression. JMP

  6. Jules Avatar
    Jules

    Where is the memorial to the 1500 people who died as a result of Katerina? This country is so whacked and bipolar

  7. Jen B. Avatar
    Jen B.

    Thanks Catherine!

  8. The Ed Avatar

    This is about a trillion gazillion times better than the Pentagon memorial but still way too literal IMO.

  9. Catherine Avatar
    Catherine

    From the NY Times editorial this morning:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/opinion/11sat1.html?pagewanted=print

    “After years of political lassitude and financial squabbling, rebuilding at the site began in earnest two years ago. That was when Mayor Michael Bloomberg exerted his considerable muscle to make sure the memorial is finished by 2011. At about the same time, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey established more control of the site. The authority and the mayor turned out to be a good team.”

  10. Jen B. Avatar
    Jen B.

    It’s been nine years. Why is there still no memorial?

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