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Many have asked for bumpers stickers, so we’re happy to offer a selection.
Click on the image below to see the full assortment.
Why not put two different messages on your bumper to really get the point across? Or send a sticker and button or tee-shirt to your favorite celebrity or talk-show host?
The Symmetry of World Trade and World Peace
How many of us would offer or accept a dazzling Cubic Zirconia engagement ring? No matter how impressive it might look, knowing it’s a fake would make the promise behind it hollow. And that’s how it is with the Twin Towers. Many of us reject their proposed replacements because they stand for nothing — in fact, they are the anti-Towers. The symmetry of the Twin Towers was an intrinsic part of the World Trade Center scheme to provide an oasis from the chaos of the city. But the effect of the proposed buildings is anything but symmetrical or harmonious. Sadly, many of the people behind them take perverse pleasure in undoing the elements that set the World Trade Center apart.
The 16-acre superblock was an important part of the effort to make the WTC a place of respite from the city streets, jagged rooflines, blaring horns and jammed sidewalks. But the principle of tranquility was above all seen in the balanced reflection of the Towers, which embodied the principle that there must be parity between those who would trade with each other or those who would make peace. Now officials are trying to undo both of those structural elements and revert to the same old same-old.
The symbolism of the World Trade Center was founded in architect Minoru Yamasaki’s understanding of Buddhist thought and his buildings had a presence about them that the people who worked in them loved. His two giants were Western Buddhas. And while there is nothing wrong with materialism — most of us are cheerful capitalists — there is a vacancy about the proposed WTC that comes from neglecting the spiritual side of the equation. The New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo and his like can get all goosebumpy about the splendors of the proposed designer buildings, but those structures could never excite the thrill that people around the city, nation, and world would get from reborn Twin Towers and no amount of insisting will ever make it so.
Twin towers have a special quality all their own. We plan to build a gallery of twins that have gone up in Metro New York — many since 9/11, including the striking Time Warner Center, which was designed by David Childs, the “Freedom Tower’s” principle architect. What follows is the reprinting, with permission, of a letter written to Larry Silverstein in the spring of 2005, by Mac Johnson of Human Events, that — while outdated in some of the details — is fresh and perceptive in explaining why one tower cannot begin to replace two:
Originally posted on Human Events Online
by Mac Johnson
May 25, 2005Dear Mr. Silverstein,
You and the other people responsible for deciding the future identity of the World Trade Center Site have one of the most unenviable tasks imaginable. You are in charge of the most emotionally charged piece of ground in America. It cannot be allowed to sit empty for practical reasons, and it must not be allowed to remain lifeless for moral reasons. Yet anything you do with the site may disappoint or anger some portion of the people who feel a deep connection to the place — which is to say, the entire country. Whatever you decide to do with the site, please know that you have my sincere hope that it will be enormously successful and beneficial to our country.
However, now that the current plan for the site — the Freedom Tower — has been forced by security concerns to enter a period of significant delay and redesign, please consider again an alternative to this plan: build back twin towers in place of the two that were knocked down. There would be nothing more inspirational to our people, and nothing more disheartening to our enemies than to see two towers reborn on the site; not simple reproductions of the flawed and dated designs — but grander towers, taller than the originals, technologically more impressive, and visually more imposing. Call the twins Defiance and Inspiration, if you like, because those are the twin emotions the site should embody.
I recognize that dedicated effort from many talented and well-intentioned people has gone into designing the Freedom Tower, both as a business enterprise and a memorial symbol. But the concept has two deep flaws that will handicap its chances of succeeding as a symbol. It may overcome these handicaps, but why add them unnecessarily to such an already difficult mission?
Most obviously, the Freedom Tower is a single tower. No matter what else is done with the design, this symbolic deficiency is glaring and inherent. Within months of the completion of the Twin Towers, taller buildings were erected, but the towers remained wonders long after the title of world’s tallest building was taken from them – because they were twin towers. Impossibly big, twice, they magnified each other’s greatness. Most cities and most nations, could only dream of building the world’s tallest building. New York and America decided to build it twice on the same lot. Imagine that only one tower — identical to the two we knew — had been built on the site. Would it have had even half the effect? The day it became the second tallest building in the world, would it still have inspired so much pride?
Secondly, much of the structure of the Freedom Tower is empty — a steel and glass ornament perched atop a much smaller single tower. The “World Trade Center” is an ambitious name. The Twin Towers lived up to it — and that is why they were attacked. They were global in significance. They were beehives of financial activity. They were such potent symbols because they were not merely symbolic. Like the Pentagon and the Capitol, they were seats of real power, filled to the top with energetic tenants. They did not wear empty hats to claim their heights. Two towers of 110 stories each are being replaced by a single tower that — despite its vacuous tiara — has only 60-70 stories of usable office space. Pushing empty latticework and a well-lighted antenna 1776 feet into the sky is impressive, but it’s nothing like putting people in the sky to overlook the world that looks up at them. Several nations have sent probes to the moon. America sent men. The difference resonates, don’t you think?
It is not too late to fill the sky with men and women, to fill the site with twins that stand guard at each others side — that speak more powerfully than any words that America cannot be injured but for a brief moment, and that she grows always greater. Savages from a failed culture that could never have built the towers or even the jets that knocked them down sought to lower us, so that they might believe they are our equals. Please consider carefully your response to them. Show them that they must rise to our level — for we will never decline to theirs.
The greatest memorial that could be built to the Twin Towers and the dead they entombed, is to rise again to the sky in impossible parallel. Two towers of 111 stories is the least we should strive for. The Twin Towers are a symbol more powerful than any we could seek to invent to memorialize them. Make them live again.
Respectfully,
Mac Johnson
Six months before terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers, they smashed the two giant Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. This is excerpted from a piece by Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune that appeared in the New York Times | October 29, 2007:
People still speak of the Buddhas as if they were there. The Buddhas are visited and debated. A “Buddha road” just opened. It boasts the first paved surface in Afghanistan’s majestic central highlands and stretches all of a half-mile.
But the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan are gone, of course, replaced by two gashes in the reddish-brown cliff. They were destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban in their quest to rid the country of the “gods of the infidels.” The fanatical soldiers of Islam blasted the ancient treasures to fragments…
Memory, however, is another matter. It is stubborn and volatile and hard to eradicate. The keyhole-like niches in the rock face are charged. Absence is presence. The visitor is drawn into the void as if summoned, not by vacancy, but by the towering Buddhas themselves.
