Power of love makes us winners
Power of love makes us winners
Power of love makes us winners
When the hijackers hit the Twin Towers they didn't know what they were getting into
Sunday, September 10, 2006
By JAY PRICE
STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE
Five years.
Funny, it still seems rawer than that.
Tomorrow will make five years since the hijackers drove the planes into the buildings, and the area at ground zero is still mostly a hole in the ground, the mess in Iraq drags on toward civil war, and Osama Bin Laden's still in the home-video business, all of which only masks the essential truth of what happened that morning in 2001:
We won.
We won in those first awful moments, when the jumpers were already falling into the street, giving a hint of what was to come, and the first firemen and cops and EMTs were running into the burning buildings.
We won when Charlie Kasper and CHUCK MARGIOTTA, and a thousand other off-duty firefighters ... eight times a thousand ... left the safety and comfort of their homes or their cars ... when nobody would've blamed them if they'd hesitated, and nobody would've known ... and rushed toward the danger.
We won when firefighter Stephen Siller got as far as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel -- where the Twin Towers seemed to loom just behind the entrance, and anybody headed for that part of Manhattan could see what they were getting into -- and strapped 80 pounds of equipment on his back and ran through the tunnel, and got to the World Trade Center just in time to die.
When love trumped hate, the way it always will.
We won all over again when Siller's siblings, who could've given in to the pain and the bitterness, decided to change the world instead, in their brother's name.
The hijackers found a way to bring down the buildings, and kill a lot of people whose only crime was getting up that morning and going to work.
They hated their own lives so much, they were in a hurry to die.
That's why they could never be anything but dirt under the shoes of the New Yorkers who loved life so much they were willing to risk theirs to save others.
That's why we won. Because we're better than the bad guys, and we shouldn't forget it or be afraid to say it, the way we should never forget the heroism and sacrifice of that morning in 2001.
It doesn't make us perfect. God knows we prove that more every day.
We're plenty capable of panicking, of over-reacting, of doing things we'll regret. We're the same people who put Japanese-Americans into camps during World War II. Some of us are still too ready to forfeit the same freedoms our soldiers and Marines are dying to defend, in the name of greater security.
But without knowing it, the hijackers brought out the best in us; not just that day, but in the weeks and months that followed, when the funerals and the memorials kept coming -- how many times could we listen to "Amazing Grace" or "Going Home?" -- and New Yorkers remembered to be kind to one another.
For a little while, anyway, we even remembered to put the games in their place, and stop confusing wide receivers and second basemen with the real heroes.
Steve Siller wasn't the only hero on a day when there was plenty of room for heroism, and no shortage of candidates, not all of them in uniform.
He was just the one who ran through the tunnel that morning, and became a symbol for all the men and women who did what they did out of love.
Love for the job.
Love for each other.
Love for people they'd never met, and didn't know the first thing about, except that they needed help.
Who knows what the bad guys thought they were accomplishing? Maybe they thought we were softer than this. Maybe they thought we'd grow afraid, curl up in a ball, and forget what made us who we are.
But that's only because they didn't know us.
They never met Steve Siller or CHUCK MARGIOTTA or Charlie Kasper, or all the others who were so much better than that.
How could they know, filled with hate the way they were, about the power of love?
Jay Price / Staten Island Advance