Peak sad?

So I fell upon this sugar-sweet explosion of commissioned street art spitting distance from the most somber memorial in New York City and my first reaction was, “Oh, have we hit peak sad and now we’re trying to ‘happy things up’ here?’ Turns out, well, yes, that’s exactly right, as a quote in Architectural Digest shows that one of the hired artists says that’s the direction he received. Sure enough, people were taking selfies galore, and Instagram is filled with the results.

I’m still sorting out how I feel about this. Considering that every single human younger than my college-aged younger daughter wasn’t born when 9/11 happened, maybe something like this is a great way to get people Downtown and inadvertently expose them to the infinite pools of pain there. And yet it was so incongruous.

At least it got me thinking.

If interested, here’s what I did after the towers fell.