9/11/2001 AND THE FOREVER YOUNG

SO MUCH TAKEN; SO MUCH GIVEN

FOR US FORGETTING IS NOT AN OPTION

AND THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE

TAGS: SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 TERRORIST ATTACKS,

WORLD TRADE CENTER TWIN TOWERS – NYC,

UNNATURAL DEATH, THE PASSAGE OF TIME,

REMEMBERANCE, TRIBUTE TO THOSE TAKEN,

GRATITUDE FOR WHAT WAS GIVEN,

FDNY, PAPD, NYPD

(Thursday September 11, 2014. Battery Park, NYC)  The familiar annual rituals were conducted with all due respect and solemnity earlier at the World Trade Center Plaza.  Names of those who perished in the attacks here in New York City on February 26, 1993 and September 11, 2001 in the World Trade Center Twin Towers were read by members of their families as were the names  of those who died 13 years ago today at the Pentagon in Washington, DC and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.  The haunting sounds of bagpipes and the crystalline trumpet notes of Taps provided an appropriately moody soundtrack before and after the reading of the names.  The polished fire bell was struck, moments of significance observed in silence, and within hours the bulk of those assembled had departed to home, their lives and families no freer of remorse and grief than they were when they left home this morning but certainly a little consoled for having mourned among others whose experiences they shared.  As public an event as 9-11-2001 was, it was a deeply personal day for New Yorkers and we wear a significantly more complex vest of emotions connected with what occurred on that day, the days, weeks and months immediately after and right up until today.

Being this close to New York harbor, the briny scent of the sea is prominent as the breeze from the northwest hustles the air along.  There is something primitive in that scent; it is registered in the innermost structures of the human brain.  It seems to fit the mood this part of town evokes on days all year round but especially on a day such as this.  It is at this most southern tip of the island of Manhattan that we meet the sea.  It is the scent of movement, of arrivals and departures, of the cyclicality of the tides; tides as another marker of time’s passage. There is a comfort, though, given by the ebb and flow of the endless tides. It is on the tides that both promise and hope ride; the undercurrents and eddies of morbid and morose concentration need not warrant concern. Today, here, we feel the raw sense of loss as acutely as we did 13 years ago today.  We recall who we lost and value who we still have. 

**********

Death, in all its guises is never really expected.  Sure, death has a smoother texture when it takes an elderly parent or grandparent; a satiny gracefulness when it comes as the ultimate relief from a long, protracted or debilitating and degenerative disease process.  We accept death as the price of growing old and the growing part of that equation is typically thought of one made over the course of decades.  We grow up, some marry, have children of their own and so it goes.  The tempo of life is kept by heart beats and ticks on the clocks.  Calendar pages flip, seasons change, and it is only after a mad dash of years has somehow slipped by like an eel visible through the murky waters as a shadow just out of reach below the surface calm, that we realize just how fast it all goes.

At some point for most, our age and lifetime become a simple arithmetic equation requiring nothing more than the ability to add and subtract.  When we reach an age where we fully appreciate that we are closer to the end than we are to the beginning, is when the cruelty and sadness of time’s inexorable march takes hold.  It may only be during fleeting, idle moments as we go about that which constitutes our daily life that the equation makes itself known like a fly landing on your ear, an annoyance to be swatted away.  Sure, we can see it, the linear certitude of time in the mirror, on the faces and bodies of the children we held and nurtured as newborns now grown, gone on, and occupied with their own particulars. 

Modern medical science has expanded the length and quality of our lives.  Perhaps, just for this simple equation, the age of 90 is the endpoint.  Certainly, in this case a person who celebrates their 50^th or 55^th birthday has indeed begun the downward trek towards the end.  And, as time passes while neighbors and coworkers, cousins and siblings begin to die, we become, even just in those moments, more cognizant of our mortality; the inevitability of our own demise.

 

We may begin to give serious thought to our pending death and “make arrangements”; write an advanced directive or living will.  We define what conditions we believe we would not want to live under.  We might make it known that we do not to be kept “alive” if our heartbeats and respirations are more a product of Con Ed than our own physiology.  Certainly, no one wants to exist in a chronic comatose state.  When neurological function can no longer be detected by monitors, whoever lived in that body is no longer present: brain death is actual death and there is no coming back once that chasm has been traversed.

Perhaps it is the simple arithmetic of so much of the unnatural death on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, that is the saddest.  The overwhelming majority of those innocents who lost their lives that day were young, vital, active, engaged and certainly not expected to die when they awoke that morning to catch a plane or go to work.  The thousands of smiling faces on makeshift posters that sprung up all over New York City, the sidewalk memorials that seemed to appear magically overnight, depicted young, vibrant people.  The faces of the Members of Service of the FDNY all so healthy and hearty looking; the NYPD and PAPD Officers all still on the job that fateful morning with hopes and dreams of retirement days still years off in the far distance.  Yes, what was taken from us that day was the best of us.  Our youth taken in what had been up until that gorgeous September morning the most unspeakable, unimaginable way, left those who remained to forever feel the weight of that loss just as the amputee still feels the pain in a limb long since removed.

Death is always painful, always difficult but when death strikes like an act of the Old Testament God in a fury of nature it delivers an additional shock.  Not that the deaths of this day 13 years ago were an act of God in any way, shape or form; they were an act of no one’s god, they were the acts of evil in its most pure, unvarnished, methodical delivery.  Yes, it was a shock, a shock like none of us had ever heard, seen, felt, smelled, and tried to comprehend in the moment. 

The stark dichotomies of that morning in Lower Manhattan lent the atrocity an even crueler hellishness.  That amazingly clear, cloudless, azure New York City September sky suddenly marred by angry clouds of billowing, black smoke, orange flames raging from windows as helpless souls crowded at broken out windows seeking relief, redemption or just another gulp of air.  Likely all of them above those fires realized on some level that rescue was remote.  Conversely, the Firemen  who ran up those hundreds and hundreds of stairs ascending in the narrow stairwell passing the descending from above never gave up on the belief that rescue was imminent.  That was what they did and why they were there.  There were countless acts of sacrifice and humanity by people who survived inside and some of those who escaped that will never be known except by those particular people.  There were incalculable acts of heroism and balls; of grit, determination and the fight for life. Acts of selflessness and grace that only the Lord above bore witness to.  Yes, there was much given on that day and on an anniversary such as today it is easy to overlook all that was given to strangers by strangers, to coworkers from coworkers, from FDNY, PAPD and NYPD to the people and public they served. 

********** 

Having borne witness firsthand, having shouldered the agony and sorrow of loss there is also the responsibility to honor it but not be hindered by it.  Milestones have turned to millstones for thousands of families across New York City and the metropolitan area as well as the wider world.  There were rites of passage and celebrations where a parent had been prominently absent.  There were graduations and weddings, vows taken and exchanged without one relative or friend who’d been meant to share those moments but could not.  September 11, 2001.  9/11/01; that date, those numbers, our memories and thoughts so defined by three simple digits 9 1 1. 

Even though thoughts and memories of that day and the days after are carried deeply inside each of us in a personal and private way, protected from tampering, and resistant to fading, this one day, this anniversary is an occasion to gather and mourn collectively and celebrate the lives of those who we lost. 

Sadly we remember them as they were that day, when they left home for work, the last time we saw them.  After 13 years having passed we have aged but they remain the age they were when they were taken from us.  There are empty photo albums and a dearth of family portraits and vacations pics.  It took some time for any semblance of normalcy to be returned to our lives.  And among those who serve, the Job has never been quite the same.  It still retains all its old luster but has been tempered in the flames and fires forged in our memories of mortality and circumstance.

The sun will set on this September 11^th just as it has every year since that Tuesday the 11^th of September in 2001 and with its setting, night will take over and this particular day of recognition, grieving, mourning and commemoration will conclude at midnight when the 11^th bleeds into the 12^th.  And so it goes, on and on. 

http://nypost.com/2014/09/10/generation-911-growing-up-in-the-shadow-of-the-towers/

http://www.ny1.com/content/news/215315/city--nation-mark-13-years-since-september-11th-attacks/

http://gothamist.com/2014/09/11/nyc_commemorates_13th_anniversary_o.php

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/september-11-anniversary/

http://nypost.com/2014/09/11/911-family-members-honor-loved-ones-in-song-and-in-charity/

 Copyright The Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved

   

TODAY APRIL 14: SOLEMN IN 2014; GRIM ANNIVERSARY FROM 1972

NYPD BURIES OFFICER GUERRA WITH HONOR

P.O. CARDILLO’S FAMILY STILL WAITS FOR HONOR

TWO TRAGIC DEATHS

THAT ALTERED NYPD POLICY

TAGS: NYPD OFFICER GUERRA FUNERAL, NYPD FIRE RESPONSE POLICY,

NYPD OFFICER PHILLIP CARDILLO, MOSQUE #7,

NYPD HISTORY, NYPD TRADITION,

SERVICE, SACRIFICE, HONOR, DUTY, NYC

(Updated)

(Monday April 14, 2014 Rockaway Beach, Queens, NYC)  Two men separated by a generation, one honored and laid to eternal rest today, the other a man whose effort to honor is itself a source of contention. For some this inconsistency reflects the reality that New York is a tale of two cities but, it really isn’t.  It is more a single city of a million tales, of thousands of stories and neighborhoods, characters famed, infamous, known and anonymous.  This City has a storied history and every day new pages are written into that dense tome.  We have known great triumphs in our past and have suffered through dark days.  There is an almost homeostatic quality to this living, breathing beast of 10 million individuals, opposing forces and influences reflected in our governance and tolerance, in what we think we share and that which  we all will never have in common beyond the fact we can all identify as New Yorkers.  The unique dynamics that function like atomic particles and hold this City together as an entity somehow make it all work.  For the most part despite the ups and downs, it remains, we remain.  And there are so many stories.  This is a story of a date that will live in NYPD both as a day of infamy and a day of sacrifice; April 14^th.

The briny scent wafting over the gathered mass of dress blue uniforms along the streets in Far Rockaway is a world apart from the urban scents of auto and bus emissions and ethnic foods on 116^th Street in Harlem that seem to defy the fact that the Atlantic Ocean is just a few miles way. Two different worlds in one City:  the largest and most complex and diverse in America.

Here in the part of South Queens that many New Yorkers never venture out to, the strips of beachfront where Hurricane Sandy’s roiling tides and winds delivered so much deadly destruction not too long ago, a 38 year old man; a son, husband father and Cop, was laid to rest amid thousands of his fellow Officers looking like a human ocean of blue extending to the shoreline horizon.  NYPD Officer Dennis Guerra was buried after succumbing to injuries sustained when he and his partner responded to reports of a fire in a housing project building in Brooklyn.  As is customary for all line of duty deaths he was given the righteous, respectful send off by the NYPD he had served so well.

If a crow were to take flight on an ocean breeze current from here and land a few short miles to the northwest, it might alight atop a squat, stolid building with a plain concrete façade, the longtime home of NYPD’s 28^th Precinct.  Exactly 42 years ago today another NYPD Officer, Phillip Cardillo was shot and lost his life in a line of duty death six days later.  He too was a son, father, and husband and a Cop but his funeral was not attended by the Mayor or Police Commissioner, no luminaries or politicians saw fit to pay their respects.  To this day an effort to honor Officer Cardillo with a mural to be painted on the side of the Precinct House parking lot wall and by renaming the segment of the block the 28^th Precinct sits on after Officer Cardillo remains a “controversial” issue that sadly and obviously the new NYPD Commissioner wants to avoid. 

April 14, 1972

One has to travel back in time to the City as it was on April 14, 1972.  Racial unrest had spread from the Deep South and was now being waged in cities across the northeast out to the west coast.  The peaceful “passive resistance” strategy championed by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was not bringing enough changes in society for the younger generation of “civil rights activists”.  These younger leaders were far more militant, strident and aggressive than anything Dr. King could have imagined or condoned.  But, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam were taking up arms against law enforcement officer all over the country and, by Spring in 1972 the NYPD was in a low level hot guerilla war with these angry armed factions.

After a fake 911 call reporting Officer’s in need of assistance was placed from Mosque #7 on 116^th Street, a Mosque lead by a firebrand Black separatist, Louis Farrakhan, where Malcolm X had prayed before the militants in his own movement assassinated him.  When two Police Officers arrived at the Mosque they entered only to be surrounded by a group of 12 to 15 men who beat and kicked them savagely and locked the doors so no one else could enter.  In the course of this melee one of the assailants grabbed Officer Cardillo’s weapon and fired at point blank range into the man’s chest.  Eventually other Cops gained access to the Mosque.  By that time all involved had taken refuge in the basement of the building.  While officers on the scene frantically tried to transport their wounded brothers to urgent medical care other Officers were making arrests in the basement.  On the street outside a large crowd had gathered quickly and before long a riotous atmosphere cast a dark pall over the block as one Police car burned and rocks and other items were being rained down on the Police from the surrounding rooftops. 

Before long Louis Farrakhan appeared in the basement with Congressmen Charlie Rangel, yes THAT Charlie Rangel and, in no uncertain terms informed the Police Officers making the arrests that if they did not release the suspects immediately, the situation outside would intensify.  Essentially, these two characters dissuaded one of the top ranking NYPD members on the scene Ben Ward, yes THAT Ben Ward, to allow the suspects to remain in the Mosque while the NYPD was ordered to retreat.  This episode was not only a damaging milestone for our City, it remains one of the most raw, painful, insulting and contentious in the history of the NYPD.

Even now, more than four decades after Officer Cardillo was buried without the honor and respect that was due him for the sordid, dishonorable reasons of political expediency and to pacify the Black community.  To this very day all efforts to pay respect for his service and sacrifice by either renaming a segment of the street in front of the 28^th Precinct or painting a memorial mural on the Precinct’s parking lot wall, continue to be rebuffed by the local Community Board on behalf of the small cadre of self-proclaimed, self-styled Black activists, African-American blowhards and a peanut choir of similar cooks and cranks who are adamantly anti-NYPD.  One of the Community Board members said that if Officer Cardillo’s death was going to be recognized in that neighborhood, on that block, that it would, “Open old wounds”.  Well, the members of NYPD past and present have been living with that same wound still open and bleeding.  Once again the cowardice of an Administration and an NYPD Commissioner is obviously a powerfully restraining force that has laid bare the distinct lack of integrity and propriety of Mayor Bill de Blasio and, even more sickening, Commissioner Bill Bratton.

Books have been written about the “incident” at Mosque #7 and, as a result of that event NYPD policy for responding to calls to any religious building or site was rewritten.  Now Officers on patrol cannot enter a religious building be it a Catholic Church, Synagogue, Mosque or other house of worship or temple, until there is at least a ranking superior on site.

APRIL 14, 2014

Officer Guerra who was laid to rest today was not alive when Officer Cardillo lost his life.  Although 42 years separate their deaths, they are both members of a continuous, steady, storied lineage of an organization that honors its history and traditions as much as it does each man and woman who has ever served. 

Officer Guerra died as a result of injuries sustained that are not common for Police Officers line of duty death.  But, that is irrelevant on this day.  He and his still hospitalized partner responded to a fire and it was the toxic smoke from that fire that felled them as quickly and effectively as shotgun toting thugs.  Since that fire the NYPD has already announced new protocols for Officers as “first responders” to a fire scene.  This is a case of fixing the fence after the herd has escaped but, it might save a future life.  It is difficult to say.

Policy and protocol do not trump courage, dedication and sacrifice.  What the members of NYPD respond to day in day out, 24/7, 365 days a year are as many and varied an array of scenarios as Officers in any other jurisdiction will ever see throughout their career.  That is not an insult to other Police Departments or Law Enforcement Agencies; it is the simple reality of policing in New York City.

Hopefully no one will read this as a comparison between the two Officers.  It is not; it is a statement on how even though the state of affairs in our City may vary from time to time, through good times and bad, one consistent, solid chain that keeps it all together is the continuum of the NYPD and its traditions and, despite the inherent danger the Job entails, there will always be men and women of good decent desire to serve.

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/renaming-street-slain-officer-phillip-cardillo-open-old-wounds-article-1.1755185

http://policeny.com/pchmtemp.html

http://www.nypdangels.com/cop/cop.php?id=159

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nypd-officer-phillip-cardillo-37-year-old-murder-case-complicated-article-1.362832

http://nypdconfidential.com/columns/2009/090413.html

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/14/nypd-officer-told-to-get-muslim-leaders-blessing-to-honor-cop-killed-in-mosque/

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/uptown/art-proposed-harlem-precinct-wall-article-1.1753736

Copyright The Brooding Cynyx 2014 © All Rights Reserved

I JUST WANTED YOU TO KNOW, DAD

I miss you Dad as much today as I did in the immediate days after you passed on.  The grief has never abated, my mourning will know no end but it is not a sad and morose presence in my life.  Quite the contrary.  It is an on-going steady stream of remembrance, some of it wildly funny, other moments weirdly ironic, and other recollections infused with your character, your decency, tolerance and quiet strength.  You were a damned good Father despite being hamstrung by life, your wife, and the circumstances of your youth.  I understand so much of it so much better today than I did during the silent nights of those weeks I sat vigil at your deathbed.  I get it, Dad, I really do.

As the old memory reel of black and white recollections from a black and white time plays in my mind, you have come to mean even more to me in death than you did in life.  Don’t get me wrong; I wish at some point of every 24 hour chunk of time that I could pick up the phone and hear your voice or hop on the Uptown 4 train and knock on your apartment door.  I know how you’d greet me and that we’d go out on the Avenue for a burger and a few cups of coffee.  We were always as comfortable with each other as two people can be, particularly; given you were my Father and I your son. We spoke the same language and shared an uncanny familiarity with the rough terrain of disappointment, frustration, and lost opportunity but, we could laugh at the hands we’d each been dealt secure in the knowledge we’d played them to the best of our ability to bluff, counter and fold.  As you said to me on more than one occasion, we were not good luck people or bad luck people; we were simply hard luck people.  Perhaps our individual reach was limited by this reality but I think not; at least not in your case.

I am profoundly and eternally grateful, Dad, that there was nothing left unsaid between us.  You were my hero as I had said to you so many times especially in the last decade of your life and, as I age and gain a wider perspective afforded only by the passage of years, I appreciate even more who you were, what you stood for, and how you conducted your life; your incredible, selfless sacrifices as well as your indomitable sense of duty.  I only wish I possessed a greater allotment of your genes; I’d be a better man if I did.

Only a man possessed of true strength and inherent toughness is capable of showing the gentleness, compassion, and kindness that you did so naturally, so easily.  I think of the crucible you were born into and the years that shaped you and that just days after burying your own Father you were on a train out of Penn Station heading to Parris Island and whatever the Marine Corps would come to demand of you.  The harsh, often brutal realities of your Marine Corps service shaped you further as much as it did change you but again, your strength, courage and sense of duty never let you falter. To the day you died you exemplified all the Marine Corps stands for and, you endured far too much before you were ultimately called Home. Your departure from here left a void even greater than the life you lived and I know you look down on the children you created and the children they created with quiet satisfaction. 

Today I can walk the same streets I walked with you as a boy, a young man and a not so young man and recall vividly so many of our conversations and each step I ever took at your side is cherished, valued beyond measure and remembered with a sense I cannot easily convey.  I have stopped from time to time since your death into one of the diners we’d frequent both in my mind and in person.  But it is not in those places I recall you best or where your spirit dwells.  No, I can visit those places anytime, anywhere I might be. 

Your presence is often felt so palpably that I have to remind myself you are gone.  But perhaps the truest measure of a man and the life he led is in the vibrancy of the memories he left in the hearts and minds of those he left behind.  If so, Dad, you were a Titan, a Giant, an ordinary man with extraordinary character, integrity, Faith, and love.  Perhaps not the stuff of Marine Corps legend but certainly the stuff of one man’s, one Father’s legacy. 

My prayer for you today is not one of mourning; it is one of respect and gratitude.  I thank you for everything you gave me, taught me, told me, and showed me.  Be well, Dad.