Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties

With summer in full swing, it was with much anticipation I planned a short trip to head out of town and visit my son who is interning in a summer job in New York. My travel to the Big Apple used to be far more frequent in days past and I have always enjoyed the time there, the city clearly deserving of its reputation and its notoriety as one of the great urban centers of the world. Back then, if you were living and working within the nonprofit world in the South, New York was the epicenter of organized philanthropy nationally, most especially if your cause was associated with the great social movements of the 60’s and 70’s. Then, too, heading up north was also a function of where the money was. 

 

Organized philanthropy developed more slowly in the Southeast and the purposes for which it was available often very narrowly defined. That has changed. Over time, philanthropy has evolved. It became less about charity as check writing and more about philanthropy exercising roles of leadership and its engagement in tough issues. Of these issues, the Southern U.S. had plenty. The region was a bellwether, long harboring highest rates of poverty, lowest rates of education, with higher, devastating rates of job loss, underemployment and unemployment. With the exception of perhaps the Delta and Indian nations, the South and Appalachia together represented our nation’s worst economic inequality, a vast social and economic backwater of broken promises and failed dreams. If you were from the South or the Appalachians, you carried the taint of being third world in a first world nation.  

 

Time has passed and these regions have soldiered on. Think Ralph McGill and the new South, LBJ and the War on Poverty. The yawning deficits of past failures seem hardly tangible now. Economic populism put a new coat of paint on most everything if not an outright fix on the deterioration below. The Great Recession has roiled that surface and stirred up a resonance heralding back to an earlier history. This unwinding threatens to resurrect some of the worse artifacts of those turbulent days. How soon we forget, it seems.

 

On that note, while in New York, I visited the Tribute World Trade Center Visitor Center that has been given a temporary home in the footprint of the bombing and collapse of the World Trade Center towers.  The gallery at the Center is run by the families of victims who died as a result of this horrific act of terrorism. The space is small and cramped and though its goals are deeply compelling, the physical space is entirely eclipsed by the construction on a grander and more ambitious scale right across the street. You can see rising into the skyline, from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, this newest edifice to commerce emerging now at the World Trade Center site. The permanent memorial that is part of the plan remains deeply hidden in and under the shadows of the new buildings.  

 

It is stunning to think, as we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11 the actual Tribute WTC  Center is only as far as we have gotten in honoring and remembering those whose lives were taken and lost. Somehow, the architectural drawings don’t quite fill the emptiness of that deferment. That said, the power should not be underestimated of what is offered and archived for those who visit the temporary Center. To visit there is to understand and share with others some sense of the terrible pain and suffering inflicted directly on so many.  In a way, the Center has achieved a purpose that big architecture is unnecessary to convey: what it means to love, be loved, and go on loving, standing on the precipice and peering into an abyss of loss, yet still finding the courage to go on living, hoping, and dreaming of a world without terror and hate.  

 

There are hundreds of photographs of those whose lives were lost that cover the walls of a room in the Memorial Center. They are snapshots from family albums given by their loved ones. The mural of faces is the face of the world, men, women and children, of every hue, color, nationality, age, culture, ethnicity, religious faith, national dress, and sexual orientation. In all the present debates about who IS an American, we would do well to remember that on that day, when the earth stood still, our answer was “We all are.”