In honor of Memorial Day, I think it would be well worth your time to read this article in The Weekly Standard which talks about the proposed Flight 93 Memorial, and compares it to the ad hoc memorial which it will replace.  Looking at the volunteer efforts, and the true heart felt remembrances that take place now is truly moving.  But then we see how Uncle Sam is moving in, replace memorial with politics, and generally screwing it up.  I'll give you some clips, but the whole thing is worth reading:

Towards the end of September, one of the residents of Shanksville set up a small memorial for Flight 93 in her front yard. She woke one morning to find a bouquet of flowers next to it, with a card that read, "Thanks for saving our lives--The Capitol employees." It was the first of a stream of tributes that would be left in Shanksville.
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The people coming to Shanksville have changed the temporary memorial; visitors have adopted the custom of leaving things behind. The fence is covered with tiny tributes, everything from firemen's helmets to baseball caps to crucifixes to prayer cards. Near ground-level it is not uncommon to see collections of Matchbox cars and other toys left by children. There is a 15-foot cross by the flagpoles now, an array of benches bearing the names of the dead, and a set of 40 small wooden "Freedom Angels." The county administers the temporary memorial, removing and storing mementos when they become weather-beaten and keeping a catalogue of every item that has been left behind.
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As is its wont, the federal government set out to improve this small piece of perfection. In 2002, Rep. John Murtha and Sen. Arlen Specter assembled the Flight 93 National Memorial Act, calling on the National Park Service to establish a permanent, national memorial in Shanksville. It passed both houses handily and was signed by President Bush on September 24, 2002. The sausage-making then began in earnest.
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After choosing the Murdoch/Nelson Byrd Woltz design, the Flight 93 Advisory Commission set about justifying the project, compiling a 215-page draft of their General Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement. The conceit of the report was that the commission was evaluating two options: leaving the temporary memorial as is, or building the new memorial. It is no scandal that the commission's report concluded that building the new memorial was preferred. But the justifications they used were revealing.

The author closes with this statement... "The problem isn't that we've run out of heroes in America. We just don't know how to honor them anymore."  He nails it on the head.  Now that the federal government has become involved, the memorial has stopped being about those who died in a final act of bravery that day.  Now it's about dozens of other groups who want to have their say.  Instead of memorializing good people, its about memorializing something completely different and unrelated.  Where people now have an opportunity to leave something behind to say thank you, people will eventually be left with something much more cold.

I think the problem here is time.  If you look at the great memorials in this country, the one thing that they all have in common is that we waited a certain amount of time before creating them.  Interestingly enough, it seems to usually be around 50 years for all of them.  Perhaps that's a good thing.  It allows emotions to settle, on both sides of an issue.  It allows the full impact of an event or person to be weighed in some measure by history.  It also allows a certain degree of impartiality.

But here's the thing.  We still need to express that emotion, and the current memorial does that so wonderfully.  And yet by building the "official" one so soon, it robs us of that opportunity.  We need to wait.  Not enough time has passed for all the emotions of that day, and the events that were triggered on that day to play out.  Memorial Day is about so many things.  A time of somber remembrance, but also a time of emotional thankfulness.

In this day and age everything moves so quickly... but some things always seem to take the same amount of time.  Computers may run faster, but emotions still take a long time to play out.