Remember the cause of 9/11

To the editor:

It is wonderful that Riverdale has a 9/11 memorial garden. On 9/11, my brother Billy, captain of Engine Co. 21, FDNY, gave his life at the World Trade Center. I will have to stop by and see it.

It is especially great that it includes an authentic artifact of the destroyed World Trade Center that acts as a direct and immediate reminder of the attacks of 9/11. 

Something that the billion dollar, eight-acre National Sept. 11 Memorial at the WTC, by design — which commemorates exclusively “loss,” with no recognition of the cause of that loss — intentionally excluded. 

The WTC memorial was designed and chosen specifically so visitors to the site would not have to confront the attacks. So they can, in the words of the memorial architect, think about 9/11 “or not.”

It’s like if the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor excluded the U.S.S. Arizona.

The 9/11 attacks were so terrible and traumatic that, for all who witnessed and experienced it, it lives on still, as Councilman Eric Dinowitz makes clear.

However, we must beware dedicating our 9/11 memorials so exclusively to our need for “solace” and “reflection” that they become essentially places of forgetting.  As we have done at the National Sept. 11 Memorial at the WTC. Where critics praised it for not recognizing the attacks.

Denying memory does not provide healing. 

And, more importantly, as very recent events have shown, we cannot afford to forget the threat of fanaticism and hate in our world.

Michael Burke