The River Reporter Online - Letters to the Editor

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The River Reporter welcomes letters on all subjects from its readers. They must be signed and include the correspondent's phone number. The correspondent's name and town will appear at the bottom of each letter; titles and affiliations will not, unless the correspondent is writing on behalf of a group.

Letters are printed as they are received, or at the discretion of the editor, and without correction to grammar or spelling. It is requested they be limited to 500 words; correspondents may be asked to cut longer letters. Deadline is 1:00 p.m. on Monday.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Latin and Greek were normal components of the average high school curriculum. At the beginning of the 21st century, Remedial English was the normal component of the freshman college curriculum.

I maintain homes in both the Upper Delaware Valley and in lower Manhattan. It was sad to read, “As Public Yearns to See Ground Zero, Survivors Call a Viewing Stand Ghoulish” in the Metro section of Sunday’s New York Times. The bitter quotes from relatives of September 11 victims betray an ignorance of this city project, and suggest that coping with such grievous loss often involves a selfish lashing out at good people who feel compelled to commiserate.

The bereaved parents who disparage the orderly admittance of viewers to the platform are wrong. From my own visit, I know these crowds are deeply respectful; the lumber and plywood of the structure itself are by now covered with thousands of scribbled tributes to the victims and their would-be rescuers in the police and fire departments.

Those who protest that viewers are intruding on their grief are misrepresenting the facts. The brother who complains that viewers would clamber to witness any future recovery of corpses ignores that the platform is well removed from the rubble, placed 16 feet high across Church Street, behind a barricade of construction huts that permit only a broad overview of the 16-acre site. Four months after the horror, it’s past time for the bereaved to regard this vast area as their personal gravesite; it belongs to the world—to everyone who’s been subjected to television depiction of it ever since September 11.

I put my visit to the Ground Zero ramp in the same category as my trips to Pol Pot’s Killing Fields in Cambodia; to the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau; to WWII battlefields and allied cemeteries in France and Italy; to our own Gettysburg; even to the “original” ground zero in Hiroshima. I forced myself to experience all these places not from any ghoulish obsession with death and destruction, but to make certain I’d never forget or belittle what happened in these places of horror. I also visited out of respect and compassion for all those who died there. These homages were hardly pleasure trips (I made each one in conjunction with happier travel destinations: Angkor Wat, the city of Krackow, Europe, Imperial Japan). I feel every citizen of our world who is able is obligated to confront such bitter truths along with man’s finer aspirations.

I became aware that others may be incapable of such a realization when I posted the Times notice about platform visiting procedure on the lobby bulletin board of my co-op in lower Manhattan. Since my building lies halfway between South St. Seaport (where no-fee access tickets are distributed) and the platform ramp beside St. Paul’s Chapel, I am often stopped on the street by lost strangers with non-New York accents, seeking directions to the site. My building has a tradition of sharing neighborhood data, so I felt fellow residents should have this information to pass along to visitors. But when I posted the notice, it was anonymously snatched down by an inconsiderate neighbor. So it’s not just the self-obsessed “survivors” who need grief counseling.

Our family has spent many enjoyable summers in Sullivan County. We are writing as mother and daughter who live in New York City. I, Amy Lief Lustig, live in Belle Harbor where a plane recently crashed into our neighborhood. And I, Eve Lustig, for the past few years have lived less than a mile from what was once the World Trade Center site. We are tremendously affected by what has happened to our city, our communities and the lives of so many people we know and don’t know in these recent months. Like so many others, we have gone from feeling stunned and worrying about the future, to being pleased by a beautiful, sunny day, to thinking about our neighbors. There can be many feelings that don’t seem to go together.

We are so grateful, especially at this time, to know Aesthetic Realism, the great, kind education founded by the American historian and critic Eli Siegel, and taught in New York. We are learning how to meet what is occurring and to see it in the best way we can. In an issue of the international journal, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #1493 titled “Terror and Liking the World,” Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism Ellen Reiss tells of the scientific and kind basis for how to see the world we are in, now and at any time. She writes:

“Mr. Siegel put the crucial matter for mental well-being in the following question: “Is this true: No matter how much of a case one has against the world its unkindness, its disorder, its ugliness, its meaninglessness one has to do all one can to like it or one will weaken oneself?”

Aesthetic Realism states that the world can be known more truly, liked more honestly by seeing it has an aesthetic structure—that it is a rich relation of opposites, such as dark and light, high and low, the ordinary and the surprising. Reiss continues:

Large opposites in our present worry are the Known and Unknown. Known and unknown feel painfully askew when a government official says there will likely be a terrorist attack but we don’t know when, where, or how. Meanwhile, known and unknown are opposites “which, as one, we see as beauty itself.” They make for big pleasure in music as we await a note, feel it will come, yet don’t know just what we’ll hear. They are one in a good conversation – in which there is inter-understanding yet surprise. They are one in a good joke, when we hear something we didn’t expect, yet which seems so fitting even as it jars us. Are known and unknown, the expected and unexpected, deeply one in this world? Let us not say no or yes too swiftly, but let us keep asking. As we honestly ask, we are liking the world.