For me, this comes to mind - if I was one of the victims of 9/11 that perished in those buildings that day - I would want my country to pursue those bastards with steely resolve and not stop until we had VANQUISHED them once and for all!
At least, with Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust victims - there is some little sense of closure in that we defeated them. I don't have that sense of vindication or closure with 9/11 - quite the opposite. It feels like an open oozing sore that never can heal.
This museum IS a tomb! I think if one of my loved ones had perished there, it would bother me too. Yes, celebrate their lives - but never FORGET and never REST until the enemy has been obliterated!
I must agree with you on this issue.
I understand and appreciate the laudable human impulse expressed elsewhere in this space, that as human beings we must move on with our lives and not be afraid to laugh and sing and drink and make merry. So we should. Our very humanity demands an appreciation of the life that has been given us.
But not there.
There is a time and a place for everything, and in this event there is no cause to celebrate, especially while standing in the very footprint of what too many of us still pretend was a "tragedy" or a "catastrophe" but which was in truth, an act of mass murder.
The building that now casts its shadow over that giant footprint is in part, a rebuke to the murderers. The waterfalls that today softly cascade upon the tombs of incinerated innocents, with their names etched in stone above two great square holes in the ground serve both as a reminder and a warning. Life does go on, but we must never forget and never again allow our complacency and tolerance of evil to permit such a thing to happen again.
By conducting a party on such a site, we demonstrate neither remembrance, nor reverence, nor respect, nor reflection. Instead, it demonstrates a will to forget, and a willful blindness.
Many of those responsible for evil acts like those that resulted in the need for a WTC memorial are still at large.
And they are watching us.