The following appeared in the New York Daily News on Friday, Aug. 1st:

“A Little Bit Spiritual”

Gov. Paterson visited the Daily News Editorial Board Friday to discuss numerous important topics on the public agenda, one of them being the future of Ground Zero.

Here, with further comment from us hardly necessary, is what the governor eloquently had to say about New York’s obligation to open a memorial to the 9/11 dead by the 10th anniversary of the terror attack - along with his perspective on how the World Trade Center reconstruction became such an unending shame.

“It went from rebuilding the area and memorializing the dead to the most complicated real estate adventure that I’ve ever heard of.

“And my feeling is, why don’t we prioritize and be a little bit spiritual and ethical about this? Why don’t we build a memorial - just build it?

“I know we can build a building in three years. I know we can build a building by 9/11/11, and start there and then maybe everything will flow from that, and not upside down, which is where I think it is now.

“I think it is sinful, that’s the only word I can think of, that 2,700 lives were lost there, and that if we wanted to show the terrorists that we are a resilient society, instead of making people work there when it was clear that there were problems there - if we wanted to show real resilience we would have put our best minds together and built that area up right away and not let it turn into the latest real estate boondoggle.

“Here we are nearly seven years later and we’ve got the unfortunate situation that people now have created their own memorial. They just go and look at the site. And that just offends my conscience.

“That’s why what I’d like to do is build a memorial as a lesson to all of us of how we have disrespected, in a sense, our country. Our country is looking to us to put something up there that will honor the people that worked there and honor the civilization that was attacked that day. And we haven’t done it.”