Updated: I’m sorry to say that my prediction was right. It was Barbra Streisand’s husband.
Someone wished me a “Happy Memorial Day” this year. Given the nature of the holiday, it was a rather surprising comment, but it’s indicative of what short-term thinkers we have become. A day to honor the deaths of the brave isn’t a happy occasion. Solemn, sobering, thoughtful, prayerful… all of those, and more, but not happy. I will not be surprised, sometime down the road, if we are wished a happy 9/11. I’m reposting what I wrote last year about the difficulties in writing my 2,996 tribute to Rudy Mastrocinque.
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In 9/11 and Katrina I commented on how I responded to 9/11.
Like most people, I remember exactly where I was on 9/11. I was working a help desk for a hospital system, and the phone unaccountably stopped ringing. I could make outgoing calls, but after a while I wondered if there was some problem with the phone, so I went to go ask the folks in the control room if they knew anything about it. Half the department was huddled around the TV, watching replays of the first plane hitting the tower. Then the second plane hit. I left the room and sat by my silent phone, playing spider solitaire. After a while I went back to the control room, and watched the replays of the towers falling. Then I ate lunch, caught up on some projects I was working on, and went home, having answered maybe 5 calls all day.
A week later the magnitude of it really sunk in and I completely lost it.
I have spent many hours researching the life of Rudy Mastrocinque for my 2,996 tribute. In some ways, he was quite an amazing man, but in others, he was actually a fairly typical American. I don’t say that to diminish him or his contributions to society, but to exult in the fact that this really is a very special country. We are free. We can choose whether to go “above and beyond” and in what area we would like to serve. The fact that so many people use their freedom to serve others in any capacity, rather than sit at home and watch CSI reruns, is just amazing to me. I know quite a few people who live and love and serve others much like Rudy Mastrocinque did. Typical Americans, yet irreplaceable.
While learning his story, I cried nearly continuously. I cried for his wife, who is around my age, because she lost the man she was married to for almost 20 years. I cried for his daughter, 15 or 16 at the time of his death, because he will not be able to walk her down the aisle. I cried for his son, 11 at the time of his death, because he will have to grow to manhood without the example and input of his father. I cried for his brother, because Rudy will never see his children – twins born after his death. I cried for all the children who lost a coach who knew that soccer is a game, not a life or death match, and yet also knew that learning to play fairly and energetically helps you in so many other areas of life. I cried for his friends and his soccer teammates, who lost a buddy who was caring, clever, and just fun to be around with his steady supply of jokes. I cried for America, who lost so many good and caring people, and in many ways, our innocence, on 9/11.
And finally, I cried even more because so many of my countrymen do not seem to understand that the loss of nearly 3,000 of our countrymen is not the cost of doing business, not excused by any “root causes,” not a cause for manipulation and blameshifting on the part of ANY political party, and in short not acceptable for any reason whatsoever. Some people have openly stated that they’d like to see another successful terror attack because it would further their political goals. Others have said it doesn’t matter, because more people have been killed in other places and circumstances, and that it’s wrong to focus on these “few.” Just on this one day, I hope that those people will remember that the people who will be killed in the next big terror attack – and there’s bound to be a successful one eventually – are real people, like Rudy Mastrocinque. Not pawns on a political chessboard who may be sacrificed for expediency’s sake. Not just nameless, faceless victims who happened to die, as we all will die someday.
It’s personal. Every loss is personal, every attack and every threat is personal. The point of the 2996 project was to remind of us that. Not out of fear, because “next time it could be you” but out of respect and remembrance of the magnitude of our loss as a nation. In order to read each tribute over the next year, you would have to read 8.2 tributes a day, or 249 a month or 57.6 a week. To read them in a week, you’d have to read 428 a day. To complete them all on 9/11, you’d have to read 124.83 tributes an hour, for all 24 hours. That’s how many people we lost. They deserve to be remembered, and it speaks well of us and of them if we suffer some pain in the remembering.
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