One Last Thing About 9/11/9 and One Last Pic, this one of my bro & I at the WTC long before 911

Attached to this post is a photo my parents took of me and my little
brother (I'm the cuter one on the left) sitting in front of The WTC
Sphere sculpture as it originally stood, in between the Twin Towers.
I'm guessing it had to be taken in the mid-to-early 1980s since my
little brother is still shorter than me in this image (he's really my
step-brother and today towers over me by several inches).

A few decades later, while my wife and I walked past the site where
that picture was taken, now a big hole in the ground surrounded by
blue fencing, I looked for the memorial spotlights the City of New
York had been using to commemorate the victims. In years past, I had
heard that they were placed in the hole. However, they weren't there
on this September 11th. They were on, but several blocks south.

My wife suggested that perhaps they were moved to avoid getting in the
way of construction of the permanent memorial. I replied:

"What construction?"

Politics and miscellaneous city-BS has kept anything else from being
built on the spot over the last eight years. This is absolutely fine
with me, since I've always felt that the spotlights were the perfect
homage to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the WTC.
Poetic, haunting, somber, and practically impossible to exploit for a
quick buck. They're actually suggesting that shopping areas be
included in the memorial in some capacity.

I say we pave over the whole thing and leave the spotlights in place,
year-round. Have a gift shop and a non-profit org to pay for the
electricity that the spotlights use. Hell, we could even take
donations to set up solar panels to gather energy in the day to power
the spotlights at night.

I used to think that Ground Zero should just have another pair of
towers built on it and let a bunch of businesses set up shop inside.
My idea was that we'd be showing the terrorists that they haven't won.

The problem is, they did win.

Ground Zero, to me, is a tomb stone, not just for the 2752 people who
were killed thanks to the attacks, but for the countless number of
people who have died because of how America reacted to the
attacks--American soldiers, Iraqis and Afghanis who have died because
of the wars we were so convinced were necessary after we were attacked
by a handful of rag-tag loser-extremists who got very lucky that day.

Let the lights stay.

Let them serve as an eternal flashlight on ourselves and our decisions
in the days, weeks, months and years following that horrible day in
September.

We need anything but "business as usual."

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Orignal From: One Last Thing About 9/11/9 and One Last Pic, this one of my bro & I at the WTC long before 911