Ground Zero: A Monument to Violence?
Nov 1, 2011 by Bruce Wallace, 121Contact
It is with great anger and sadness that I write this piece about the monument ‘they’ are planning to site at Ground Zero. It will carry the Green Beret motto and depict a lone U.S. commando on horseback in the Afghan mountains; a monument to violence at the very spot at which so many victims of violence were murdered.
My anger is directed both at the group of cowardly members of Wall Street banking firms (they ask to remain anonymous) who have privately financed this monument to violence, and to the bureaucrats that are allowing this to go forward. Where was the public hearing? Where was the sensitivity?
In a particularly callous statement one of the private backers was quoted by CNN as saying, “We wanted to do [this]…because every day since 9/11, we've had to look at that hole in the ground." A statement seemingly cold to the fact that for so many Ground Zero is much more than a ‘hole in the ground.’
My sadness stems from the lack of compassion inherent in this proposal. We have just witnessed 10 years of useless loss and devastation as a result of our invasion and occupation of Iraq and the ongoing operations in Afghanistan. The American lives lost are countable, as are the wounded soldiers who gave so much for so little. The ‘collateral damage’ (as the military likes to refer to innocent civilians killed or wounded in or as a result of war) was enormous. Millions of displaced persons, hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, and countless wounded and traumatized victims follow in the wake of the wars.
And this speaks nothing of the tax dollars that went from the American people into the pockets of those who profit handsomely from military actions. Don’t forget: the US10 billion dollars a month we spent (for ten years) in Iraq, did not just vanish into the air. And now we are spending that much on both Iraq and Afghanistan.
My hope is that we can stop the statue from ever sitting at Ground Zero, and let our government, and those heartless bankers know we need monuments to peaceful solutions, not to violent profit taking.
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