Ground Zero: A new frontier

\"Are you going to visit Ground Zero?"\nIt was the first question out of my grandmother's mouth. I was visiting with her before leaving on a Christmas trip to New York City. I was shocked that she asked, since she's the same person who refused to take me to see "Schindler's List." "I lived through all of that," she told me. Grandma is not one to dwell on morbidity.\nWhen I came home from the Big Apple, my stepfather immediately asked if I had seen Ground Zero. My mother also asked about it after expressing her dismay at the plans for viewing platforms that will enable on-lookers to get a better view of the disaster site. She spoke solemnly about the religious quiet she experienced at the Pearl Harbor memorial, and of her fear that the viewing platforms in New York would become a commercial mockery of that kind of experience. "Devastation! Brought to you by the proud Americans at Acme insurance!" Arriving before the viewing platforms had been constructed, I had to settle with the street level view. It was awful. But to be honest, it was no worse than the photos we've all been digesting for the past several months. The fact of the matter is that an enormous skyscraper complex in the financial district of New York was demolished by two large passenger planes. In the process, thousands were killed. And the dust of the destruction can still catch in your throat.\nWith an active imagination, that's all the information you need.\nThe only startling revelation is how far you can see. Normally, in Manhattan you have to crane your neck to take a look at the sky, and the buildings are so close together that it often feels like a cloister of concrete.\nBut now, turning the corner onto a blocked-off-block filled with police cars and memorials, you can glimpse a space that seems as wide open as the prairies must have felt for early pioneers.\nThat's really what Ground Zero is: the last remaining patch of American frontier. We've won the West and walked the moon. Who would have thought that the last bit of undiscovered country would open up in the middle of the most developed, settled plot of land in the entire U.S. of A.? It's a landscape of uncertainty and fear, and just as rugged as the one crossed by the settlers, the gold diggers and the Oakies.\nWe Americans have such a mixed history with frontiers. We stole one from the natives, settled it with slaves and killed un-counted Chinese and Irishmen in the process of tying it together with railroads. We've had a bit more luck with the medical and technological frontiers, but there have been serious glitches. Thousands of uninsured children. "Temptation Island."\nA frontier is a space of possibility. It can be filled in any number of ways. Right now, a myopic man-hunt for Osama bin Laden is distracting us from contemplating the possibilities. After that, it will be hard not to confront the emptiness in New York. Do we want to fill it with the same greed and hubris that drove Manifest Destiny? Or will we approach this new horizon differently, committed to resettling our country and our culture on the backs of ideals, not the backs of men and women?\nCall it a New Year's resolution.