It
was "cheap" aviation fuel and an emotion that brought down the World Trade Center.
To be sure, the towers themselves were also an emotion that yielded ten million
square feet of office space - erected with the industrious heat of ambition and
an Ayn Rand sense of manifest destiny. Whether the hit on the towers was organized
rage or cold-blooded orchestration it was the mother lode of fossil fuel that
sustained the flames that melted the integrity of the building and returned 16
acres to pure possibility.
All things that have grown out of the hunger for cheap fuel fed the impulse
that hit the towers. And the fuel itself fed the fire that turned the buildings
to ash and vaporized the human bodies.
The 16 acres at ground zero should become a monument to a future free of this
literal and figurative fuel. The 16 acres should be the foundation and launch
pad for non-combustible energy that will now move and light the world. Any building
or vehicle on those 16 acres should run from energy created by wind, solar, tidal
and renewable biomass - or any and all new forms of energy that do not require
fuel sucked and privatized from beneath the ground on which other citizens live
- energy which does not pollute both environment and bodies - energy which does
not tempt the urge to colonize, oppress, occupy or explode.
No fossil fuel should ever pollute that ground again and from that ground should
radiate a new era of energy, technology and economy. Fossil fuels are combustible
on every level. If the need for cheap fuel caused operatives in the U.S. government
to use our military in an oppressive and aggressive way, a price may have been
paid for that.
As has been quoted widely yesterday on the national media one of the terrorists
spoke to us in his final newly released video statement. "Keep your fat hands
out of our land." Clearly, as presidents have told our high school students, violence
is not the way to resolve grievances. But the ashes of ten men who believed that
it is, are now imbedded in those 16 acres. The fact they used violence does not
make the grievance any less real for millions of other non-violent people. For
the sake of those millions and as a monument to the victims, ground zero should
be dedicated to the development and implementation of new, revolutionary forms
of energy.
Not only for the distant millions but for the millions right here this monument
should emerge. Anyone hoping to make a political point by deploying weapons of
mass destruction simply has to look at what we are sitting on. We are sitting
on our own weapons of mass destruction. On 9/11 the weaponized fuel may have been
bought from Iraq or Saudi Arabia but it was ours. Iraq's development of weapons
is pointless - the weapons are here. The enemy has only to figure out how to detonate
the ones that sit perilously contained all around us and beneath us.
Even without being detonated, our steady burn of fossil fuel and our spread
of chemicals and our proliferation of nuclear are destructive to the masses. The
weapons can either seep slowly into our tissue or more fanatics who want our fat
hands off their land can explode them.
Our defense is not more military build up. Our best defense and our greatest
monument will be the dismantling of the incendiary medium of our forward motion.
Ground zero should be the site on which the world will find only energy that surfs
the wave of natural givens and does not impose a volatile, toxic and flammable
will on the planet. Ground zero should now mean the beginning. The America of
ingenuity and genius should begin its monument to those lost and take what are
now their 16 acres and the country into a new and peacefully power filled future.
Bill C. Davis is a playwright http://www.billcdavis.com/
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