Letter to the editor

Volume 16 • Issue 21 | October 21 – 27, 2003

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Buses at the W.T.C.

To The Editor:

I like your paper a lot. I read it cover to cover, including the ads whenever I get a chance to see it. I look for it. It covers Downtown better than anything else I’ve seen. Hope you win some journalist’s prizes. You deserve it.

I was so glad to see David Stanke’s frank, clear piece advocating the only common sense placement of the bus facilities — in the “bathtub” (Talking Point, Oct. 14 – 20, “Put the bus garage under the W.T.C. memorial”). It’s the only thing that makes sense. Anyone who has been in Boston’s spectacular South Station bus terminal, where there is no bus parking, knows the misery that a too small footprint can have on a facility like this.

The problem here is a political one. There are a group of respected people sorely hurt by our foreign policy who are setting an unrealistic agenda. Yes a memorial is required but once the city crowds in around the World Trade Center site again, the idea of it being sunk deep underground will make it the most unpleasant of places. This is a city. There will be no wide open spaces to memorialize anyone, except high up in the sky. We are all part of a much bigger organism, the city itself, which needs to function to live. A greater loss in the historical perspective would be the failure to take the opportunity to make the place work.

The memorial is burned deeply in my memory. It can only be felt there. But in the end there are no memorials for the uncounted people who dropped in their traces every day, building this city to what it has become. Yes the victims of this tragedy died suddenly and unexpectedly, most in fear and heroism, but death often meets us that way. There have been no calls to gather every ash that scattered itself across this city and its rivers. It is as obviously unrealistic as the present calls to sanctify the footprints. To quote from memory a great American president, “we cannot desecrate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men (and women), living and dead who fought here have hallowed it far beyond our poor efforts to add or detract …” The best memorial in my opinion is to give the city back it’s heart, let it pump life and commerce through it’s arteries, lift the memorial above

the garages, into the sunlight. Please give us some politicians who have the nerve to do and say what needs to be said and done. And lets plan for the future.  As sea levels rise, why have a memorial underwater?  An underwater bus garage would be fitting.

Jamy Lasell

E.P.A. info