What’s the one lesson you learn in your first middle school civics class? “If the government is involved with it, it’s going to take a lot longer than expected.” Such is the case with the news that, after cutting costs and stopping and starting over the past year, the Michael Arad-designed September 11th Memorial, “Reflecting Absence,” has had its unveiling pushed back to 2011, instead of two years from now, meaning it will come a full year before Daniel Libeskind‘s also-supposed-to-open-by-2009 Freedom Tower, which has also been pushed back. But when it comes to a subject of this emotional weight, people aren’t raising too many complaints:

Charles Wolf, whose wife was killed at the trade center on Sept. 11, said that builders should wait to open the memorial if necessary. He said he didn’t want to mourn at a construction site.

“This is not the kind of thing when you want to do a soft opening,” Wolf said. “You don’t want to open a memorial when it’s a work in progress.”