The anniversary of the September 11 attacks has started sneaking up on me. The days of preparing myself for it well in advance are apparently over. Even seeing the bright beams of light they shoot off into the night sky from Ground Zero doesn’t affect me the way it used to. I suppose that’s a kind of healing.
The New York Daily News has an excellent article (complete with pictures) about where the rebuilding of Ground Zero stands right now. Finally — finally! — One World Trade Center is almost done, twelve years later. (Just don’t ask me to call it the Freedom Tower, because seriously?) Even so, the building won’t be open until 2015. Neither will the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, which was originally supposed to open back in 2006. But 2015 is a lot closer than it sounds, and after a decade of being mortified by the bullshit surrounding the rebuilding effort it’s nice to see a tall, landmark building at the south end of Manhattan again. That’s been missing from the skyline for too long.
In other good news, Osama Bin Laden is still dead. In bad news, all the crazy shit the Bush administration implemented after the attacks got worse under Obama, not better. Warrantless wiretapping? That seems almost quaint now in light of the NSA’s dragnet of every American’s phone and email activity. Extraordinary rendition? That’s almost nothing compared to “targeted” drone strikes, where some victims are reported as militants, even if they were just walking by when the bombs fell, simply because they were male and of a particular age. Oh, and now the President can assassinate American citizens with drone strikes without proof or judicial oversight. “Freedom Tower” indeed.
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