9/11

October 14th, 2019 myself and the members of the Innovation Lab went to the 9/11 memorial and museum to ‘celebrate’ the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York City. And partially to get inspiration for our memorial park that we are building for the history of Germany. The most meaningful part of my trip to the 9/11 Museum was the room with all of the names and photos of the victims. It was 4 falls top to bottom with all faces and names of every casualty. There was also a room in the middle of all the faces that had a continuous loop going on of this voice narrating what these people were doing that day, and what their jobs were, and why they were on that plane, or why they were in the building. Sometimes there would be a family member speaking or a close friend.

The “In Memoriam” exhibit what the most ‘effective’ you could say in drawing the viewers in closer. The room had the best quality videos of the planes crashing into the buildings, it had pieces of the planes, trinkets from the buildings, like phones, watches, printers, computers, etc… What I found cool was the FBI most wanted poster of Bin Laden with a $5M reward for whoever killed him(with inflation that’s worth about $7.9M today). This just befuddles me; the drastic measures that the US government put into killing this man.

The “In Memoriam” room again is going to be a critical part of our Memorial park. What was so inspiring of it was the minute by minute of what happened. So in our park, we decided to and achievement by achievement wall that will wrap around the park, littered with information about what happened in our era of German history. We were also inspired by the standing beam covered in graffiti, and we decided to do something similar. We chose to take the spire of the Berlin TV Tower, and cover the top in some kind of red ink, to represent the blood and iron speech given by Otto Von Bismark.

The reason these memorials are important is that if we don’t memorialize history, then certain people and certain aspects will be forgotten. If we don’t memorialize these kinds of events, then people generations from now will only hear rumors of a plane that ‘apparently’ flew off course and hit a building. With these memorials, not a single soul will forget that day ever.