H 84°, L 63° | Tomorrow: 
H 81°, L 63°A huge piece of steel on fire above me.
A fierce wind, like a hurricane.
Thousands of people, screaming and running down the street.
I remember seeing what I tell myself were mannequins, which I know they weren''t, and bundles of rags on fire. — World Trade Center survivors, documentary from The National September 11 Memorial & Museum
What are we to remember from Sept. 11, 2001? The building of history around a tragedy is complicated by the diverse views of those near to and far from the World Trade Center that day. The touring National September 11 Memorial & Museum will host a ceremony and exhibition starting at 10 a.m. and continuing until 6 p.m. near the Capitol tomorrow, providing answers to that question.
The ceremony will open with a community signing of a steel beam recovered from ground zero and speeches by a Sept. 11 first responder and a retired New York firefighter. An exhibition with photographs, artifacts and a short documentary with testimony from survivors and those close to the events will follow on the 100 block of Martin Luther King Blvd. between Main Street and Doty Street, according to the organization's website, National911memorial.org.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum is touring the country to educate the public about plans for a memorial and museum at ground zero, and seek donations large and small from across the nation.
Participants in the ceremony include first responder fire chief Debra Amesqua and Lee Ielpi, a retired New York firefighter and Vietnam War veteran who lost his son Jonathan Ielpi, also a New York firefighter, during the World Trade Center attacks Sept. 11.
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“What are we to remember from Sept. 11, 2001?” your writer asks without a hint of irony. How about this: A “tragedy” is the best way to remember it? You know it’s like the multiple choice tests: “Choose the best answer”? Not the one you like. It was not a hurricane or an earthquake or a tsunami. It wasn’t some colossal, catastrophic accident. It was an attack, by terrorists against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents. Now, maybe for some cockamamie reason your paper might prefer not to put it that way, but one would think that journalistic ethics would compel you to faithfully convey the truth rather than using slight hands of language to avoid it.
However, your article neatly fits in with the spirit of the “National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center.” For there also, a handful has decided to dictate what people should think and feel by controlling what they know.
The last thing those behind the memorial at the WTC site want is to “educate” visitors to the site to the um, terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. As per the 13 member jury, all history of 9/11, all that we remember 9/11 by, all the authentic artifacts of the attacks and the WTC that speak directly to the attacks without sentiment or prejudice, cannot be restored to the site. That would “tell us what to think.” All that history the tour refers to and those artifacts they present must go out of sight of visitors to the site and be “relegated” - the jury’s word - into NYC’s first and only underground museum.
The facde remnants, the Koenig Sphere (“it has a new beauty now” it’s creator has said), the crushed fire trucks, all that must be replaced by minimalist architecture in order to impose a meaning - the jury’s - of ambiguity upon the site. Free of any reference of what happened there, Sept. 11, 2001.
Visitors to the WTC will not be free to confront 9/11; they are not to draw any political or moral lessons; register no blame, make no judgments, take any lessons, find any inspiration or resolve. The entire site must be remade to serve only our needs as a “special place of mourning our losses” -without any reference to how and why they were “lost.”
If we did this anywhere else but where America was attacked the howls from those who are usually the first to defend our freedom of expression and thought would be deafening. But at the WTC, because it was America that was attacked and the values demonstrated somehow less worthy of our attention, and certainly less of our endorsement and preservation, there is nothing but silence. In fact, it was intellectuals and artists behind this effort and who support it, aided by oblivious, self-serving politicians.
So now, because publications like the “Badgerherald” as reflected by their description of the 9/11 attacks as nothing more than a “tragedy” happen to agree with the views of the memorial handful, they partake in these Orwellian efforts. But ask yourself, if your allow your freedom to be compromised this time for the sake of thinking the right thing, how do you next time it won’t be your ideas they sacrifice? How do you know? Note: On Sept. 11, my brother, FDNY Capt. William F. Burke, Jr. of Eng. Co. 21 gave his life.