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Civil Society at Ground Zero:

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Repost
November 25, 2011
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Civil Society at Ground Zero: You Can Crush the Flowers, But You Can't Stop the Spring

Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch, Nov 22, 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175471/

 

Editor's Note

Solnit's piece is rich, imginative, and unusual. Among other things she makes a strong and enlightening connection between 9/11 and OWS. I (Michael) highly recommend it. Here's an excerpt: 

Now world-famous Zuccotti Park is just a small concrete and brown marble-paved scrap of land surrounded by tall buildings. Despite the "Occupy Wall Street" label, it's actually two blocks north of that iconic place. It's rarely noted that the park is within sight of, and kitty-corner to, Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers crumbled.

What was born and what died that day a decade ago has everything to do with what's going on in and around the park, the country, and the world now. For this, al-Qaeda is remarkably irrelevant, except as the outfit that long ago triggered an incident that instantly released both the best and the worst in our society.

The best was civil society. As I wandered in the Zuccotti Park area last week, I was struck again by how much what really happened on the morning of September 11th has been willfully misremembered. It can be found nowhere in the plaques and monuments. Firemen more than deserve their commemorations, but mostly they acted in vain, on bad orders from above, and with fatally flawed communications equipment. The fact is: the people in the towers and the neighborhood -- think of them as civil society coming together in crisis -- largely rescued themselves, and some of them told the firefighters to head down, not up.

We need memorials to the coworkers who carried their paraplegic accountant colleague down 69 flights of stairs while in peril themselves; to Ada Rosario-Dolch, the principal who got all of the High School for Leadership, a block away, safely evacuated, while knowing her sister had probably been killed in one of those towers; to the female executives who walked the blind newspaper seller to safety in Greenwich Village; to the unarmed passengers of United Flight 93, who were the only ones to combat terrorism effectively that day; and to countless, nameless others. We need monuments to ourselves, to civil society.

 

Read the rest at http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175471/

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