Democracy Gets It Right With The Twin Towers Site

And so, for the twelfth time since Al-Queda turned four passenger airplanes into terrorist missiles, September 11th has come and gone.

I once wrote that one doesn't measure recovery from a tragedy of this magnitude in days, weeks or months, but rather in years and even in decades.  We are now more than a decade beyond those horrible hours during which we electronically witnessed the deaths of thousands of innocents, some of whom were only beginning to truly live their lives.

For me, over these twelve years, the anniversary has frankly always been a bag of mixed emotions.  Part of that stems from the fact that it was my late father's birthday--and, no matter what, I feel bound a sense of filial duty and personal love to spend part of the day focused on him, and on what he meant to me and so many others.  But the mixed emotions are also about the day itself, about what it meant to the nation, and about how we remember and honor it.

I remember being appalled by the immediate use of the attacks as an excuse to not only unilaterally advance the partisan agenda of the party on whose watch the attacks had occurred, but to also willfully subvert the Constitution in order to do it.  The party of "toughness" wrote a feckless interpretation of our most fundamental rights into law, and handed terrorism a five-star victory even while cities were burning and bodies were bleeding.  I remember being beyond appalled by the march to war in which this same party successfully bullied not only their political opponents, but also the truth itself.  All of this compounded the damage done to the nation and our lives--and will take decades more of recovery, with no guarantee that it will ever arrive.

None of that, however, changes what happened on September 11, 2001.  Over three thousand people lost their lives and, for a time, the greatest city in the nation feared for its economic (if not for its physical) future.  How do you honor and remember the victims?  How do you ensure the future of New York, the greatest and most successful intersection of culture, commerce and community in the history of the world?

As it turned out, democracy held the answer.

The City and State of New York opened the memorial/rebuilding process up to the public in an unprecedented way, giving thousands of people in New York and even across the nation an opportunity to give direct and specific input into what was to be built on the former site of the World Trade Center.  Architects from around the world were invited to submit proposals for both a memorial and new office space, and the public was allowed to vote on them.  Along with these proposals, there was heated debate about the general plan for the site itself.  Should it have any office space at all?  Should it have any type of tall structure at all?  What could be done to ensure protection against another attack?

The process was long and drawn out.  It ranged from the general plan to the most specific of details about the lives and dreams of the victims and the city.  It produced ideas ranging from rebuilding the Twin Towers to turning the entire site into a memorial park.  It led to the selection of a single proposal that, in turn, was refined by even more discussion and debate.  All of the discussion and debate was passionate, even angry at times, but it remained focused on the goals of remembrance and recovery.

And, in the end, that's exactly what we have on the site.

Two giant voids on the footprints of the Twin Towers, containing memorial fountains and the names of the lost.  A combination of emptiness, serenity, and memory.  Surrounded by new towers that will help to carry on the economic life of New York, and will help us to remember not just how the victims died, but how they lived as well.

Democracy isn't always pleasant or peaceful.  In fact, it's often the case that it's working really well when it is at its least pleasant and peaceful.  But it's the only political path that leads all of us to where we need to be.  We need to remember that fact, as much as anything else from September 11th, and hold as tightly as we can onto this messy, heated, drawn-out thing called democracy, and not let its enemies--within and without--take it from us.  Too many people have died for it.  Too few of the living realize not only how much we owe them, but also ourselves.