. . . of all that happened down below. I'm sitting in my room on the 19th floor of the Millenium Hilton hotel with an unobstructed view of the site of the World Trade Center in NYC, still familiarizing myself with board77, writing an incoherent swan song at TORC, watching ROTK-SE on my little travel DVD player, and just thinking about the events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath (rather than preparing for my speech tomorrow morning -- I guess I'll just suck out loud, but I think I'm only speaking to about two dozen or so people, so who'll know, really??).
I have always, and will always, refuse to call the site of the World Trade Center "Ground Zero". I find "Ground Zero" to be simply a term of war and destruction, language that grows out of and is used to support a military view of what happened then and has happened since, language that caught on with the public because of our society's (at least US society's) need for simple pithy phrases to describe indescribably complicated events, language that (oddly) seems too inpersonal and sanitized as an abstraction that obscures the personal and collective tragedy that is so much better described, in my view, by referring to what I see below me as "the site of the World Trade Center."
Calling it the site of the World Trade Center, for me, really brings to my mind the true suffering of this place. It was a vast complex teeming with life, from the subway station and underground shopping terrace to the pair of 100 story towers of offices -- a place I had gone to so often in a prior professional capacity to close dozens of transactions in one of the grand conference rooms at the top that overlooked the river and the Statue of Liberty, to make speeches in the old Vista Hotel (later the Marriott) that was always so much rattier than the World Trade Center deserved -- a place where I once contemplated working, a place where a firm that my organization regulates was almost entirely wiped off the face of this earth -- well, really, it was its hundreds of men and women who made the firm what it was who perished -- a place I was scheduled to be at the following week -- a place whose attack I listened to on the radio as I inched my way forward in traffic one bright crisp morning in September, only to find that the vast Pentagon that I had just driven within clear sight of less than 10 minutes earlier was now emitting a pillar of smoke when I arrived at my office and looked back out the window, only to find myself acting the role of a desparate parent as I tried to find someone near home to immediately pull my children out of the largest Jewish school in the country for fear of what might be unfolding in Washington, only to find myself driving the long way around the Beltway back home as the short route by now had been blocked off for the emergency response at the Pentagon, only to be searching that bright crisp morning sky all the way home while listening to radio reports of an unidentified airplane thought to be headed toward Washington, only to be reunited with my children at the playground in front of our house, looking up to a sky emptied of all flying machines.
The men and women who died at the site of the World Trade Center deserve more than the pithy phrase that so neatly ties that tragedy to the gross military adventurism that followed. To be clear, I fully supported the military action in Afghanistan (in fact, I think we dithered too much before launching that). It's what followed that I find so grossly offensive, punctuated by the recent call-up of one of the people at my organization from military reserve to head over to Iraq -- a man for whom we had to put together a collection so we could buy him some body armor that he would not otherwise receive, so we can help him come back home to his lovely wife and two children. I believe, without any real evidence, that Lyndon Johnson carried with him the burden of his decisions regarding the Vietnam War, and that burden helped carry him to an early death. I fear those currently responsible for our irresponsible military adventurism lack the conscience to recognize that there is such a burden to borne.