BEARPAW!!! Wrote:
how many terrorist attack sites have a fucking VIEWING PLATFORM? i mean, it's gross, it's become totally commercialised, and to me it's just a gross attempt in the wake of something terribly wrong with the world in general to whoop up some kind of distorted sense of nationalism...
While I'm sure there's always going to be people like this at the site, wolfing down a hot pretzel and a Mountain Dew before they head up to Times Square, I would bet that many if not most people on that platform are silent, respectful and deeply moved by being there.
Some people visit their parents' graves, some don't. Some people have to face the physical facts of their loss to grieve. How many people visiting the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. actually have no personal connection to the Vietnam war? Are they exploiting the idea of the Memorial or somehow cheapening it because they're going to have lunch and hit the Air and Space Museum next? I don't really think so.
I haven't been to Ground Zero, and not because I haven't had the opportunity. But a few years ago, when I was driving solo cross country, I went to the Oklahoma City Memorial. Hadn't even been planning on it until a day or two before I passed through town. When I decided to go, it wasn't because of some morbid interest (OK, some of it was morbid interest--I'm only human), but because I knew it would probably affect me like nothing else I could have done that day.
I thought I knew about the memorial--the two black gates and the reflecting pool now blocking the street, the rows of empty chairs, one for each victim, where the Murrah Building once stood--from reading about it or seeing it on TV. What I didn't know about was the museum. In the building across the street from the Murrah building, which survived (though not undamaged) because there was a parking lot between it and the Ryder truck, they've put in a museum that tells the story of the Oklahoma City bombing, minute by minute, day by day chronologically through the bombing and the aftermath.
It was devastating. I cried all through it. To this day I can't describe it to anyone without choking up. I have rarely felt more connected to the human race than in those few hours I was in that museum, seeing the news footage, hearing the cacophany of sounds and interviews with survivors and rescuers, seeing the twisted steel girders, shattered office supplies or piles of charred shoes saved from the rubble. I never would have gotten that experience without being there, and I think I'm a better person for it.
And it makes me write long-winded, overly-dramatic, self-important message board posts. So the terrorists have won.