The Big Gaping Hole

I went for a bike ride this morning (you have to love the west side highway bike path in New York City, especially the part where it jumps out onto the street for a bit, right by the historic Cotton Club and passes in front of the Fairway Market, which smells of freshly baked bagels and pizza and then jumps back against Riverside Park and smells immediately like a sewage treatment plant). On the way back home, I got stuck coming crosstown in front of the site of the World Trade Center towers. I had been by the site many times before, but I guess never on a weekend. And I was amazed. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people lined every inch of viewable space around the enormous crater where the towers once stood. I passed by a group of young women, strapping on rollerblades, hanging over their bicycles. I could overhear a snippet of their conversation, and they were talking about someone that they had known who had worked there. I navigated up the street to hear the vendor at one of the small food shops next to the site bellow, "If you're ready for lunch, we're ready for you!" I had two contrary thoughts simultaneously -- the first, that only in America would we commercialize our tragedies and the second, that leaving this space empty for the future generations would've been the greatest and most sensible tribute to those that died there. But, of course not. We're going to build some ridiculously large structure to cover up the past because it'd be terrible to remember something in this, the country of historical ADD.

I guess that's not as profound as it felt when I biked through there.