Legacy MattersI totally agree with Jeff Jarvis in what I hope is the last gasp of the International Freedom Center's plan to build a multicultural museum about freedom at the site of 9/11, the World Trade Towers, on Ground Zerp. Do not build it. Not here.
I too want a memorial that celebrates the great heroes of that day, especially the New York Fire Department.
The IFC assumes a link between the struggle for freedom and the deaths that day. Says the IFC:
It will tangibly link September 11 and the lives of its victims
to humanity’s greatest idea: freedom.
But what is that link? Nothing about September 11th was about liberating people. The people who were killed that day were free. They were not struggling to be free. The murderers, too, were free and exploited that freedom to commit this act.
--The struggle here is for civilization against extremism, fanaticism, and criminality. So make your center, elsewhere, about terrorism, then. Have your seminars and events and debates about extremism. Study religious fanaticism. This actually is not about freedom.
The film will show how the World Trade Center attracted people from all over the globe to a place in which national and cultural differences were subsumed in trade and commerce—how Lower Manhattan has, in essence, always been an international freedom center, drawing people to a dream of free and better lives.The memorial should be about the senselessness of the tragedy on a perfect morning in September, the people who died, the lives affected and how ordinary people did extraordinary things.
The Christian scholar and author Os Guiness said shortly after 9/11 that horror and tragedy crack open the human heart and force the beauty out. It is in terrible times that people with great goodness inside become most themselves. He said, "The real mystery is not the mystery of evil but the mystery of goodness."