Fly Away, Freedom Center

As an architecture fan, I've tracked the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site expectantly, hoping against hope for the phoenixian resolution. But sadly, the progress of this effort to date forms a painfully-accurate symbol of the state of our culture. Every aspect of this multi-faceted plan has degraded into a feeding frenzy of self-agrandizing vitriole fueled by cash, power, egos, and misguided politics. If a novelist wrote this story, the critics would decry its contrivance.

Today's papers ran an article on the International Freedom Center's plea to stay in the Ground Zero plans. The city and state leaders and the redevelopment corporation want it to stay, presumably to help people remember the meaning of the event. Some victim's families oppose it, concerned that the Center could include exhibits that might not always be pro-American. I would simply argue that the Freedom Center has no place at Ground Zero at all.

The people who died that day did not die for freedom. Their death did not advance the cause of freedom. They weren't there on that day trying to push for or preserve freedom; most were just there to make a living. The reason it was such an incredible tragedy is that these people didn't die for anything. And even the fire and police personnel who were truly doing work of heroic intent were not there to rescue freedom, but to save lives, just as they would have if it had been a non-terror catastrophe.

Nor did the attack itself have anything to do with our freedom. None of the 6 reasons Osama bin Laden has given for his jihad on America have anything to do with freedom, unless you mean freedom for Middle East muslims.

And the Bush Administration's reaction to 9/11 certainly didn't advance freedom. They celebrated this event by creating the Patriot Act, throwing people in jail off American soil and denying them Geneva Convention rights, thwarting free speech and a free press, etc. etc.

They didn't attack Afghanistan to free its people, but to capture Osama bin Laden (who admittedly is still free, so there's a connection). Freedom was only their third excuse for invading Iraq, after the first two failed to convince people. And I would argue that neither Afghanistan -- which is presently being run largely by warlords and opium producers -- nor Iraq -- where the citizens can't freely walk the streets for all the mayhem -- have much more real freedom than they had before.

And now, both the victim families who oppose the Freedom Center and the powers that be who support it have managed to agree on one thing: they won't allow it to be free to choose what it exhibits. And the Center is fine with that.

In other words, Ground Zero has as much to do with freedom as Tom Cruise has with lucidity and self-composure. What the site really merits is not a Center of Freedom, but of Gravity.

9/11 and loss

The attacks of September 11th represent to me both a profound tragedy, and a critical opportunity lost. Admittedly, our democracy wasn't moving in the right direction before that day. But there may have been leaders, of either party, who would have responded to the 9/11 crisis by reassessing our priorities and revitalizing the principles of the ideal America. Those leaders could have forged us into a far, far stronger nation.

Our current government's reaction to it, instead, represented to me a full-out sprint away from that ideal. I believe it has made us weaker, more cynical, and much less caring about and trusting of each other, qualities far more conducive to an anarchy than to a cohesive, thriving society. Today half of our nation is ashamed of what we've become. And apart from the Civil War, this period may be the most acrimonious in our history.

On the anniversary of 9/11, let us remember those who were lost. And let us also remember what was lost, what was wrested from our democracy and our community, in its wake. We owe the people who died so much more of a legacy than we've given them thus far.

How to begin...

For any writer, the blank page is filled with the majesty of all that could be said, and is thus nothing short of abhorrent. After publishing the very first post, I've had a tendency to freeze, not wanting to say the wrong thing and spoil this beautiful piece of paper (er, web real estate).

But the tone of this blog is just going to have to sort itself out over time. We need to allay our fears, to abandon our urge to keep our reputations pristine, and step out into the void. Constant fear is one of the forces manipulating Americans to abandon our ideals in service of the interests of the powerful. If we as a nation don't free ourselves from the fear of this fear, we may never regain what we have lost. We who write here have to be pioneers in that effort.

Our writing may not often be Pulitzer-worthy, and we're sure to make errors (and have them glaringly pointed out ;-) but we refuse to cower. So here we go.

America In Exile

We barely noticed it at first. Most of us didn't recognize it for what it was. But now we can't help noticing. 2005: This is what happens when you take your time-honored democracy for granted.

Incredibly to most of us, we in the U.S. have been losing ours steadily, almost unnoticeably (though now with brazen rapidity) to the concerted efforts of drastically over-moneyed interests, fundamentalists pushing upon everyone religious ideas shared by few, and politicians and media outlets who cater to them both at the expense of We the people. Our own gullibility and semi-conscious willingness to indulge our baser instincts haven't helped.

As an ever-widening spectrum of books, articles, news stories, and blogs have been intoning and, by now, droning: America has left the United States.

The questions are: what's going on, and how do we regain the principles that for 200 years have made us a mostly shining example to the world?

How do we get America back?