To the editor:
The circus atmosphere of the Stiller Run in the Battery Park City and surrounding area, totally incongruous near the National Sept. 11th Memorial, made Sunday Sept. 25 an awful day for me as a resident, and was a distressing sign of what a pathetic culture we have become. Plenty of unsung heroes who died on 9/11 did not require this raucous, highly commercial event with its fascist political underpinnings. The Stiller big tent circus show certainly does not honor them.
The violation of resident rights was appalling. Battery Park City was held hostage so that the Stiller Run, life imitating adolescent-prime-time television, now glitzier than ever, could take over. Residents were not warned of the close down of the neighborhood, of the horrendous noise for hours under our windows, of the shut down of MTA bus service. The complete disregard of resident needs and rights for the entire day by a secret political inner circle process was disgusting to me as an American. This is exactly Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are protesting: big Business (and the Stiller Run is making a big business out of one man’s death on 9/11) and their politicians taking over the rights of ordinary people. That the connection is not made is exactly what the “Wake Up, America” movement is trying to get across. That 30,000 people practiced their new religion of “running,” but only a few are willing to be pepper sprayed by the NYPD is a potent sign of our social and political disarray in America. I wonder what foreign tourists on Sunday thought of this demonstration of their most negative stereotype of Americans: adolescent at any age and obsessed with money.
Dolores D’Agostino
