I feel no such enthusiasm for putting up two new targets of Babel. The bullseye on Americas back is large enough already.

Fill the hole, plant some trees and make a park in honor of those innocents who were ripped from their existence by the hate our foreign policy has created.

If it were not hallowed ground I'd recommend the first thing we toss in the hole would be the two political parties and this administration that has driven us to our current destination, but the very earth would no doubt regurgitate such foulness.

Larry Silverstein?
Hey Deroy, why not just write an article calling Silverstein "an American Hero" and dispense with all the small talk?

I've got my suspicions that Larry Silverstein is someone I would never invite over for dinner or even want to drink a beer with.

I would just bet that if you opened his closet, a whole lot of skeletons would come tumbling out.

Never mind. I value my health too much to say what I had posted here earlier.

I am from New York City in every sense of the word: physically born there, and spiritually bonded.
My family lives in Brooklyn.
First and foremost: when Minuro Yamasaki designed the Twin Towers, they symbolized in his own words: "World Peace through economic cooperation."
These were far from towers of Babel. Quite the opposite. Had they been, then in this world presently rife with corporate terrorism, they would have not been blown away.

Since 9/11, a strange city has come up upon the hallowed ground in New Jerusalem: ground, my friends, which has been hallowed long before death and it's worshippers wreaked hell and long-lasting crucifixion there: ground whose buildings both represented man's ability to ascend to the heights, not once, but TWICE over, and also the motherhood of a city whose greatness has always been in her lowliness of spirit: she who welcomes all peoples to the bosom of her shores.
This strange city is comprised of major corporations clapping one hand to the other, with a joyous: 'Aha! She is ruined. Let's invade her and cash in big time!' Glaring examples: Coney, Yankee, Shea. Three places on the execution block, so that the mother-Citi can get a name, so that only the rich can afford to watch a game of baseball, and so that the beautifully unpretentious little New Yorker can get squeezed out and die and lose his little lowly, true-New-York business to Daddy Starbucks and Papa Chase.

There is not one vacant lot, not one quiet and unpretentious place in New York, which the eyes of Tyre and her corporate mart-children have not espied as a potential place to rape and morph into a generic, spiritless wasteland.
All of this is, for the hugely disproportionate part, in the vacuous, eerie and uncanny silence of politicians of all parties, mass media, religious leaders of all religions, and celebrities alike.
And so it is, that the "official" plans for the World Trade Center have been thrust with great animosity upon a gentle, peaceful city and her grieving children, a hideously morbid and grotesque plan with surrealistic erections, and with twin abysses from hell the designers of which in their mission statement outrightly called an "inaccessible" "abyss."
And the same people with this plan most people utterly despise, are the same people who, for seven years, have left dead body parts lying exposed in the garbage dump in Staten Island, refusing to release them to their loved ones.
If this seems too hard to think about, it behooves us to remember that thousands of family members look at this day and night. A civilization is marked not only by how it treats its living, but also by how it honors its dead.

I will personally attest, before GOD and man, that millions of people in New York City and all over the world long for the Twin Towers to be restored. We are not materialistic, nor corporate heads. Just decent, spiritually-minded, everyday folk who have watched the city we love being deliberately besieged by corporate terrorism, and who are suffering because the agony has been furthered, prolonged and compounded by a people who despise the spirit of greatness (which is humility first: Proverbs) and who are making war against this: whose idea of a "war on poverty" is to destroy the poor of means and the "poor of spirit" both.
Quite simply: We want to take the J train over the Williamsburg Bridge, look West and see the glorious Twin Towers, the signature landmark of the whole earth, standing tall. We want to come from every corner of the world and see the Twin Towers from our planes, from our ships and from our car windows.
We believe man was not created by GOD to be sad, but to be happy. Therefore it is not the right of any man or any spirit of evil, to destroy our happiness and refuse to give it back to us or to our children yet unborn, who deserve to have what we had.
"Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" is not a phrase coined by politicians, some catch-words we should despise because we don't agree with everything its writers did in their lifetimes.
"Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" is a reality.
What is hallowed is for us to build back what was taken from us, rejoice in the spiritual AND in the economic upsurge this will bring the whole world, and be thankful.
Saying we should fill the gaping hole with dirt and make everyone suffer because evil is rife, is, in itself, just as evil, and is exactly what the terrorists insatiably desire for us to do.
There is nothing worth living for with such an outlook.
Let's, with fresh and renewed spirit, rebuild the Twin Towers and construct an aesthtic, uplifting above-ground memorial: to remember what happened that day, and to ALSO remember and to teach our children, how we stood for "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

Very moving JG.

My reference to Babel was meant as, Babel, as in the eye of the beholder.

The beholder being those whose countries which have been manipulated by our foreign policy and lack of respect for their sovereignty.

The right to self govern and pursue their tradition is as sacred to them as it is to us.

It's high time we stopped being the worlds decider's and face the truth that we are all resider's on what is becoming a very small earth.

I surely meant no insult.

The last stage of any species or culture is giantism. Dinosaurs became huge before they became extinct. Rome overstepped its frontiers to the point where its armies no longer had the leverage to control the battlefield.

We should leave WTC as it is, a monument to another aspect of giantism: Globalisation. How appropriate that it would be a large hole in the ground.

The American city is a showcase to non sustainability. Totally dependent on outside resources and cheap energy , they are festering sores on the surface of our planet.

In the not to distant future, places like New York will lie toppled and deserted, with nature and the Second Law of Thermodynamics reclaiming their rightful place.

Lets understand what the future holds and get with it.

Larry Silverstein was involved in 9-11 and even said they made the decision to "pull" building 7. Funny how WTC 7 fell without being hit by a plane. We still don't know how it even caught on fire since it is a full block from the towers. The claim is debris hit it. If you look at the map it is plain to see 1 & 2 are the twin towers, which somehow missed building 6, while taking out building 7.

Please tell me how debris can skip one building and wreck another behind it?

Let's not even touch on Larry's financial issues and the insurance he took out on the buildings or how he stands to make back over $1 billion above and beyond what he invested from that insurance.

Mr. Murdock must be a friend of Larry's or his publications owners must be. To mention Larry by name and encourage turning the buildings back over to him is suspicious to say the least. Privatizing the structure helped cause it's demise. Now they want to hand it back over to the same people that had a hand in it's destruction.

I, too, feel no enthusiasm in "rebuilding" the WTO. Why do we have this incessant competitive need to "show them" that we will not only rebuild, but rebuild even taller?? Didn't the original structures prove that there was not enough time for people to exit the building and that taller would only increase the amount of time needed to depart? What about the disabled? Exactly how should they escape when you can't use elevators during an emergency? Why do we have to have the biggest or tallest anything? I hope their plans fall apart, personally. I'd rather see something far more low key and respectful than some egomaniacal monstrosity called the Freedom Towers. Please!! That plan can be tossed out with the stale Freedom Fries from the local diner!!

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"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." -Mark Twain

That is my question also JerZ, Freedom used in the sense of displaying our massive ego to the world will only breed more contempt will it not?

"In olden days, Americans needed just 13 and a half months to erect the Empire State Building, four and a half years to build Hoover Dam"

Yes and in the "olden days" there was no such thing as a safe worksite. Worker's lives were sacrificed at the altar of "Faster, faster!"

We don't need to return to those days.

Boy, these posts have "metaphore" running all through them.

When we feel embarrassed regarding America's greatness, then may God help us all.

I say rebuild the towers even taller than before.

The money spent on rebuilding the WTC complex would have been better spent on getting us to walk on the moon again.

As great as the Hubble space pix have been, pix from a telescope constructed on the moon would be far superior as the telescope could be built much, much bigger than the Hubble.

Real national paralysis is us getting to the moon nearly 40 years ago and next to nothing has been done since then.

Holy crap! 40 years? There should be a whole slew of all kinds of stuff, both scientific and industrial, happening on the moon by now. There should be at least small towns already established there.

Silverstein gives lil' Stevie the willies. I can't help but feel there are all kinds of unpleasant things to be found out about Silverstein's past activities.