Tragedy and Tourism

[Confuzzled4]

I absolutely have considered and would like to go to memorial sites to pay my respects. I've been to the city many times, but still haven't paid my respects at ground zero, and I want to take a full day to do that. And there is no other way to describe all those shenanigans, it is disrespectful. It's born out of ignorance and self indulgence. So long as a site is a memorial for the dead it is a solemn place that should not be desecrated by others.

As for moving on, that to me is when people are able to laugh about a tragedy. Laughter is a healing tool. There is a time and place for everything, speech is different than desecrating a site. A site is solemn until it is declared otherwise, speech eventually is accepted. Of course that lends itself to "how soon is too soon?"

[Emiliano]

I absolutely have considered and would like to go to memorial sites to pay my respects. I've been to the city many times, but still haven't paid my respects at ground zero, and I want to take a full day to do that. And there is no other way to describe all those shenanigans, it is disrespectful. It's born out of ignorance and self indulgence. So long as a site is a memorial for the dead it is a solemn place that should not be desecrated by others.

As for moving on, that to me is when people are able to laugh about a tragedy. Laughter is a healing tool. There is a time and place for everything, speech is different than desecrating a site. A site is solemn until it is declared otherwise, speech eventually is accepted. Of course that lends itself to "how soon is too soon?"

That's a good question, how soon is too soon? I'm curious about that too. And even when it comes to the site itself, how does time passed affect it? Like Washington Square Park used to be a potters field and had a hanging tree. Something like 15,000 bodies are still buried there. And then of course the Brown building is right on that park too, which was the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. NYU uses that building now. People may have forgotten about the dead under the park, but most people know about that fire. But we don't treat them as special places. Enough time has passed or we've just distanced ourselves from those things enough we don't have to always be consciously thinking about it.

I think sometimes places might get special honors not just because of what happened there, or how it relates to death or tragedy. But also because we have been told to formally recognize it by having some sort of memorial there. I don't know, it's getting late and I've had a few drinks. Maybe I'm just going down a rabbit hole here.

[jc26er]

It's really a very good point and very thought provoking. As a NYer, 9/11 obviously has quite a large significance. It was just such a horrible time. I see you're from Brooklyn so I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

I think when there is some sort of memorial at the site with a museum or something else like that it tends to become a tourist attraction and I think that normalizes it as a tourist attraction. On the other hand when people come soon after an attack and take pictures by the destruction like that, I think that starts to cross the line. Even though I was only in 2nd grade, I think I would be pissed if I saw people going to see the destruction and taking pictures their so shortly after so many innocent people gave their life their.

As for pulse, I havent keep up on the story. Is it open? If not do they ever plan to open it again? Whats gonna happen? Such a horrible tragedy. So so sad.

[Emiliano]

It's really a very good point and very thought provoking. As a NYer, 9/11 obviously has quite a large significance. It was just such a horrible time. I see you're from Brooklyn so I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

I think when there is some sort of memorial at the site with a museum or something else like that it tends to become a tourist attraction and I think that normalizes it as a tourist attraction. On the other hand when people come soon after an attack and take pictures by the destruction like that, I think that starts to cross the line. Even though I was only in 2nd grade, I think I would be pissed if I saw people going to see the destruction and taking pictures their so shortly after so many innocent people gave their life their.

As for pulse, I havent keep up on the story. Is it open? If not do they ever plan to open it again? Whats gonna happen? Such a horrible tragedy. So so sad.

I don't think they plan to reopen it. Last I heard was that the city of Orlando was going to put a permanent memorial of some kind on the site.

It's interesting what you bring up about a place being normalized as a tourist site. It makes me think how ground zero has become a tourist destination and how weird that is. Maybe I'm just hyper sensitive about it since it's such an event that's been burned into my mind. It was incredibly traumatizing. After 9/11 I had gotten so fixated on the towers and how you think of buildings as stable structures with long lifespans and what it did to the skyline and just the absense of the towers. I was really grateful when 1wtc was finally built because that gap was so troubling to me.

That said, I always thought the towers of light was a beautiful way to honor the dead and the buildings themselves. There's also something about how they are not always lit up that I appreciate too. I had a migraine today so I'm not feeling very able to express myself right now, but hopefully you get what I'm saying. Maybe because it's such a seasonal memorial it doesn't lend itself to being normalized, to being just another thing. It's like a ghost that haunts the city in early September and then slips away again. I also like that rather than adding a monument to the site, it instead calls attention to the negative space - what's not there, rather than what is.