Politics: Crass

Ellis Henican's column in this morning's Newsday strikes a welcome refrain from a family member of a 9/11 victim:

The living brother stood in the glorious sunshine of Union Square with other relatives of Sept. 11, describing their ambitious plans for tonight. They will gather in this park, which had been such a center of public sorrow in the weeks after the terror attack. Quietly and together, they will walk to Ground Zero carrying small lights in brown paper bags. Then, with many hundreds of others, they will encircle the big hole in the ground that is the World Trade Center site.

"As we encircle the site," Andrew Rice said, "we think of ourselves as protecting it."

Protecting it from all those who are trying to use it for their own grubby ends.

The glomming politicians. The spotlight-hogging media hordes. The slogan-bearing sign-wavers. The hawkers selling Ground Zero trinkets to gullible tourists. The legal debaters and bill proposers or self-congratulatory celebrities, all of them cynically stage-managing this desperate human tragedy to advance their partisan or selfish or promotional concerns.

For one brief moment, Andrew Rice said, let all of them please stay home.

I concur.