Dialogue With Power

As the Park51 debate has heated up over the last few months, New Yorkers have been bombarded with brightly colored flyers throughout Manhattan, arguing the best possible case that there is no way in hell the Ground Zero Mosque should be built, or that the United States was founded, in part, on the principle of freedom of religion.

But one white sheet of paper stands out among them. It’s overwhelmingly bare and asks passers-by to fill in the blank: THE GROUND ZERO MOSQUE SHOULD NOT BE BUILT BECAUSE or THE ISLAMIC COMMUNITY CENTER SHOULD BE BUILT BECAUSE. In tiny print at the bottom of the page is a web address: [www.concernednewyorkers.com](http://www.concernednewyorkers.com).

The invitation to answer one of the questions was intended to capture what New Yorkers (and visitors) thought about the development of Park51, but with the removal of the chronicler from the process.

“We realized that people may have the instinct to condition their answer—or not answer at all—if directly approached by one of us,” said Adam Wissing, one member of the group that pasted approximately 600 of the sheets in Lower Manhattan just in time for the anniversary of 9/11.

The genesis of the project was in conversation among the collective’s friends. “We were really surprised at how many people who we assumed were on the same page as us [in support of building Park51] were actually against building the Islamic center,” said Wissing, “so, we decided to create a forum for people to talk about it.”

Wissing and his partners Kenny Komer and Boris Rasin—all Brooklynites—have worked together on other projects, with more to come under the Concerned New Yorkers name. With some notoriety, they pitted The Simpsons’ Monty Burns against Michael Bloomberg as Bloomberg sought to extend mayoral term limits, and they’ve ridiculed the New Museum’s self-styled—perhaps hypocritical—antiestablishment status.

But this time around, they were more interested in a dialogue without a leading premise.

“We definitely wanted this to be an open conversation for people to say what was on their minds, but we all agreed that we didn’t want it to become a place for hate speech.” Not all the comments were interested in dialogue, however, and more than a few have included expletives and vitriol, but that was to be expected, says Wissing.

So concerned with neutrality, they struggled for two hours one night over how they would word the question, but they “eventually came to the realization that there is no neutral question— everything was loaded,” said Wissing. The compromise, if there was one, was to ask two questions—one from each of the two points of view with matching language that expressed that view’s sentiments.

Komer, Rasin and Wissing are archiving the responses on their freshly launched website, which is designed to look exactly like the sheets around Manhattan. The trio routinely returns to the locations where they pasted the sheets, take photographs of the newest development and post the images on the site.

And while they’ve collected hundreds of responses so far, a couple have stuck out to Wissing: “Freedom of religion does not come with an asterisk” and “I have 13 friends [who] died in there.”

Other responses indicate not all are unyielding in their positions. On more than one occasion, the same handwriting has appeared on both sides of the line, making a point for both positions.

Wissing points out, “No one is standing at Ground Zero screaming, ‘This is a gray area!’ It feels less like indecision and more like engaging honestly with a complicated issue.”