Comment by api
3 days ago
I firmly believe that the 9/11 terrorists won. They got what they wanted, which is exactly what you describe. They also destroyed the optimism and energy of our culture. I lived through that time, and we have never recovered. The malaise of today started on 9/11/2001.
What we should have done is, as a symbolic act, rebuild the towers exactly as they were (with some structural improvements maybe) and go about our business. We should have gone after the terrorists as an international police action and not much more.
That would have been a symbol of true strength. "No, your little act of vandalism won't have any effect on us at all. We are above that." Be like the "wall" archetype in fiction, the huge guy someone punches as hard as they can and they barely notice.
Instead we showed stupidity and weakness disguised as strength, something we're now wallowing in with a whole culture revolving around fake strength and compensatory narcissism. Nothing says dying nation like gold plating everything.
Thanks to Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld, et al, who reacted to the attacks the way Bin Laden wanted them to react...
I remember reading an article in 2003 how Clinton's team wanted to handover intel about terror threats to Bush's team during the presidential transition, but the latter skipped those meetings. And remember how Bush supposedly ignored warnings in his daily briefings?
Without hanging chads and the shenanigans in Florida, maybe Al Gore's administration would've caught these terrorists, there'd be no sending kids to die in Afghanistan and Iraq... what else?
The thing with this pernicious idea of rebuilding as it was is it would have left no place for the massive commemorative space that an event like that needs.
The Freedom Tower is so unimpressive in large part because it had to fit within the constraints of the main event at this location.
Put that in the lobby of each building. Make it a giant high ceilinged space with a big granite monument, but rebuild.
The freedom tower literally looks shattered, and next to it is a giant wound that never heals. That’s what that whole site says. “We are broken now.”