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Opinion Editorials Coastal Voices Guest Editorial: 9/11: Think of the heroes
Coastal Voices Guest Editorial: 9/11: Think of the heroes
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As usual, I approach the date of Sept. 11 with a mixture of feelings ranging from sadness and anger to trepidation and the kind of hope Bruce Springsteen so poignantly depicted in “My City of Ruins” and a year later in “The Rising.” It was one of those days my generation will forever equate with that “where-you-were” syndrome when John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were lost to us.
The scenes of the towers exploding and the screams of the fleeing people are etched almost as deeply as the hollow echo of a telephone piercing the bedroom darkness with the news of my cousin’s death that day at the Pentagon, along with 46 others from the county of my northern New Jersey upbringing. My anger and, yes, hatred, toward the people who committed the atrocities, as well as those on this side of the Atlantic, who with cowardly impotence failed or refused to hunt down those responsible, still wells up during the second week of September. Which is when, knowing of the personal dividend evil and hatred invariably yields, I know I have to find some measure of value and goodness in the event, lest I become crazed.
It is then that I summon up the heroism of the men and women
who selflessly returned repeatedly to the belching fire and dust of the
Twin Towers and the Pentagon, where my cousin was vaporized, leaving
two fatherless little girls. And the passengers on United Flight 93 who
courageously rushed the cockpit and overpowered the hijackers, all to
perish in the Shanksville, Pa., farmland. And I try to recall what
real heroism is. At its core, ordinary people doing extraordinary acts
under the most extreme and harrowing circumstances.
I try to recall what I told my Little League team at the season’s end short weeks ago. That we all have our personal heroes, too often relegated to to the singular or, at best, periodic events of popular culture of sports, music, movies or, God forbid, reality television. It is then, as I told our Little Leaguers, seated in the right field grass, that I recall what a friend from New Jersey, actor and comedian Jay Mohr, once said when I asked him who his personal hero was. Expecting to hear Richard Pryor or George Carlin, I was surprised when he said, Johnny Carson. Upon asking him to explain, he said, “... because sometimes ‘greatness’ is being good every day.” And so, I told the kids I cheer and buy pizza for, to look around behind them. At their parents who slug it out at work every day to put the bread on the table, get them to practice or school or church and aren’t allowed the luxury of calling in sick on this thing called Life. Or the ones you don’t see that wear the uniforms or the fire and ambulance and hospital gear and garb, that only appear when someone’s in need. Appear and deliver. And how, every year, when my thoughts invariably drift to the insanity of September 2001, I push back the tears and the hate with the memory of the heroes of that day and the ones standing silently at the hearth and on the wall, in the wings in my home town and country. 24-7-52. Jon Alexander is a local attorney. |
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