Been thinking about this subject a lot lately: the lack of any substantial memorial or monument at Ground Zero in NYC after seven years seems weird. It’s almost like the fact that there is nothing there, that there is a void, makes the event itself open-ended. A memorial or monument functions to put something into an identifiable shape, a way of looking back on it, remembering it, and a concrete form for the public to project emotions onto. There being nothing there, no solid shape to commemorate or replace what happened keeps things open-ended, keeps them totally nebulous, allows for the meaning to be re-used and mashed-up over and over again, for that void to be filled any number of times in any number of ways. There’s that whole “9/11 Never Forget” slogan, but maybe it’s time we put it all to rest and moved past it as bigger problems seem to be heading our way as a nation: problems caused not by cartoon-cut-out terrorists from exotic lands, but by corporations, banks, usurers and the foolish and inauthentic lifestyles they model as the ideal for ordinary folks who seem not to know any better. Oddly enough, these kinds of excesses - so intimately tied in with what we’re told as consumers is tantamount to “our freedoms” - are exactly what the terrorists are supposed to have been attacking. Go figure.