Another exception to the rule.

[bladespark]

Wow, religion one day, politics the next.

Ordinarily I don't discuss politics in my lj. It tends to be counter-productive, because of the diversity of my friends. But in this one case I am going to make an exception, because this needs to be spread around as far as it possibly can, and it's something that anybody with any humanity, whatever their political alignment, should agree with.

I won't go into the details, I'll link to you a site that does a better job of explaining it than I can, but in short, the plans have been released, and the Ground Zero memorial where the Twin Towers stood is currently slated to be a heap of political propaganda, rather than a non-political tribute to the people who died there. And that's a travesty! Those deaths make that sacred ground, and nobody should be sermonizing for Conservatives OR for Liberals there!

http://www.takebackthememorial.org/

If you find you agree with what this site has to say, I encourage you to sign their petition, and to write somebody in congress about it. I never write my congressman, but I am writing a letter right now, because something has to be done about this!

Comments

[loweko.livejournal.com]

When I first ran into that story, I winced horribly. The idea is catastrophically bad one no matter how you look at it, and worse yet is simply tarnishing the reputation of liberals and academics in the US even further.

The petition won't do much, but the inevitable media uproar might.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I hope the media uproar really is inevitable. My dad is one of those people who follows politics pretty closely, and he actually hadn't heard the details of this. I hadn't heard a peep about it since they approved the building design itself. Maybe that's just because we live in Utah, but you'd think the news would have reached here in some format or other by now.

[mavikfelna.livejournal.com]

Thanks for passing the work Blade.

--Mav

[amethe.livejournal.com]

Upon reading the site, I found that nowhere does it actually say clearly what they are against. Instead, there is a single link, nestled between a large faux-patriotic graphic and a large faux-patriotic paragraph, linking to an external source which is a long, drawn out rant full of slanted rhetoric and calls for again faux-patriotic uprising to 'reclaim Ground Zero'

It gives me pause, to have to sift through red white and blue graphics to find the small print in which the meaning of the petition is found. Even the petition itself is generalized in saying basically "You should do something nice with the memorial" One paragraph is all it is, and could be interpreted in many different ways.

In short, I think there could be better ways to get the message across, rather than subscribing to this mass hill-top martyrdom/suicide. I'll have to find something less skewed concerning the issue before making a call on it... a should anyone else, rather than blindly signing the petition in the hopes that the one obscure paragraph will be read correctly by whoever recieves it.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

I do not blindly sign anything. I'll admit, I'd like it a bit better if they had a completely concrete plan of what to put in its place. But despite the sometimes overblown rhetoric on that site, I 100% agree that a memorial that mostly focuses on how horrible America is to everyone, and barely mentions what it is supposedly memorializing is, well, wrong. So I'm going to completely support them.

[amethe.livejournal.com]

Oh I agree. If what the article says is true, then yeah, the collective consciousness of the country is getting a shaft-job. I just think that maybe the platform here is a bit more destructive than it should be. Rather than one paragraph of "Don't mess this up" the author should perhaps write his own piece concerning the issue, and a more detailed petition which singles out the issue at hand in a more well-defined light.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Ah. *nods* You're unfortunately missing the context that I got this in, as the original article that drew this to my attention has since expired and been replaced. The site it was on does not, sadly archive such things. But the writer there put forth a very convincing argument.