You wouldn’t think the question of which is the tallest building in the United States needed to be answered by a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Yet there is the matter of the spire on top of One World Trade Center in New York City. Is it or isn’t it a permanent part of the building? The Council decided this week that it is permanent, and so at 1,776 feet, the building that replaces the Twin Towers destroyed twelve years ago by terrorists is now officially the tallest US building.
Its specific height, of course, is a deliberate symbolic tribute to the year 1776, when representatives from the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from the British Empire, touching off the American Revolution. The document they signed is that one that says that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable and self-evident.
Admittedly, American governments have never fully respected those rights. And though in some ways things have gotten much better—slavery was abolished, Jim Crow repealed, the franchise extended to women—governments are now much more involved in micromanaging people’s lives through their much more extensive powers of taxation, spending, and regulation. American foreign policy has not always been very respectful of the inalienable, self-evident rights of human beings in other countries, either, to say the least.
But still, the ideals expressed in that document animate a lot of Americans, and a lot of other human beings as well, including this one. They are not just American ideals; they are human ideals. Their reaffirmation is a fitting response to the cowardly murder of nearly 3,000 people. Far better than twelve years of war and the rapid expansion of the domestic surveillance state.
Admittedly, American governments have never fully respected those rights. And though in some ways things have gotten much better—slavery was abolished, Jim Crow repealed, the franchise extended to women—governments are now much more involved in micromanaging people’s lives through their much more extensive powers of taxation, spending, and regulation. American foreign policy has not always been very respectful of the inalienable, self-evident rights of human beings in other countries, either, to say the least.
But still, the ideals expressed in that document animate a lot of Americans, and a lot of other human beings as well, including this one. They are not just American ideals; they are human ideals. Their reaffirmation is a fitting response to the cowardly murder of nearly 3,000 people. Far better than twelve years of war and the rapid expansion of the domestic surveillance state.