# Posted 1:52 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

SEPTEMBER 11th: In memory of all those who lost their lives. In honor of those who laid down their lives so that others might live. In tribute to the principles for which Americans have given lives for over two hundred years.

Even though my parents live in Manhattan and I have visited them often during the past two years, I resisted visiting Ground Zero until just a few weeks ago. I am a proud New Yorker and I simply did not want to come face to face with the living evidence that my proud city had been brought low.

Was this response an irrational but harmless defense mechanism? Or was it somehow a fundamental avoidance of the issues at stake in post-Sept. 11 America? I don't know.

What difference does not visiting the Towers' site make if I know that they have fallen? Is that sort of avoidance a measure of comfort that I deserve given the emotional cost of watching them fall? Or is it a self-destructive sort of repression that will prevent me from dealing with the issues and emotions that I will one day have to face?

What if the purpose of not visiting Ground Zero was to enforce on myself a certain level of humility? I never want to be the kind of person that says "You don't understand because you weren't there." I believe that we can share our experiences. I believe that September 11th was an attack on universal principles of freedom and tolerance.

By avoiding Ground Zero, was I avoiding the obvious challenge to my belief in the universality of such principles? Is it completely absurd to speak of universal principles when there are thousands of bodies under the rubble? After all, September 11th didn't make New York different. It made it the same as Beirut and Kinshasa and a thousand other places.

Toward the end of August, I met a friend for lunch in the financial district. Walking home afterwards, I found myself just one block away from Ground Zero. How could I not go?

Enough time had passed that I didn't expect anything dramatic to happen. I wouldn't be overcome with emotion. In fact, I don't think I would've been overcome with emotion if I had visited the site much earlier on. Still, I avoided it.

By now, Ground Zero doesn't seem like a hole. It is more of an oasis. A wide open space in downtown, but one you can't go inside of. It is a construction site. As a New Yorker, I've always loved construction sites. They are the best expression of the vitality of urban life. Of renewal.

When I was six years old, all of the students in my first grade class submitted posters to an I Love NY poster contest. I drew a construction site, with "I [Heart] NY" printed on the mast of a crane.

I am almost wish that nothing would be built at the World Trade Center site, that it would remain a construction site forever. I don't want a memorial. I don't want anyone to walk on that ground again.

I just want there to be a quiet place in downtown. A reminder that this city I love could have its heart ripped out of chest but still march onwards, stronger than ever before. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion