Noticias

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The past informs the present. In some cases, it more than informs – it compels us to be the best version of ourselves. Few of us think of ourselves as heroes. It is not a word we would use to describe ourselves. Why should we? For those of us who are not on the frontlines of care and protection, heroic deeds are not in our wheelhouse.

Firefighters, police officers, the members of the Armed Forces, doctors, nurses, EMTs – those people are easily identified as heroes. That is part of their extraordinary calling – to serve and protect, to heal and to hold.

But all of us are called to be heroes. Twenty-four years ago, heroes rose from clouds of ash. They helped people move out of harm’s way. They nurtured those who were injured or dazed. They rushed in when many ran away.

9/11. It is the shorthand we use for September 11, 2001, much like an earlier generation could just say December 7th, and the year, 1941, the day of the week, Sunday, and the event, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was all understood. Not so much anymore.

I think of that this year, this 24th anniversary of the horrific attacks that killed 2,983 people at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania. I think of that on the anniversary of the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as well.

Time does not heal all wounds. It often just allows many of us to ignore that some still grieve. Twenty-four years after 9/11, there are families celebrating marriages, births, and graduations without a father, or a mother, or a sibling, or a close friend. Because so many of us want to move on, it is easy to forget there are people, who while fully living their lives because that is what they must do, still have an empty place within themselves where a loved one should be.

The two most moving moments for me during the week of commemorative events marking the anniversary of September 11^th are the Rose Ceremony for Port Authority employees that I wrote about earlier this week, and the Interfaith Service held on 9/11 for Port Authority employees, retirees, and those who have become part of the greater Port Authority family these past decades.

There is a reason why these two events are so meaningful: They are small, and they are personal. We lose sight that 9/11 was more than a national tragedy. It was a personal one for the families and loved ones or nearly 3,000 people. And the number of individuals who have succumbed to illnesses related to 9/11 is more than double that now.

Historians look at the big picture. We live in a small, single frame, and in that relatively small space we see individuals who have lost someone they loved. We see the spaces in the small frame where someone is missing, and we know why.

This year is significant because next year is the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and it will come not long after the national celebrations marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Next year will be all about the big picture and having spent so much of my professional career in elected office, I know there will be crowds of officials great and small pushing to get inside that big picture.

What happens to the families of the nearly 3,000 lost on 9/11, or the more than double that number of the families of those who died of 9/11-related illnesses? They will be in the picture, too – somewhere in the back. That is the way history is written.

I am not a historian, and neither are most of you.

We need to clearly see the individuals who still feel 9/11 personally. They will be doing that every day they draw breath. They will do that in years that will not have big-picture events for the next 50-plus years.

It is easy to understand why most of us want to move on. It doesn’t affect us, we think. But the heroes inside us – the heroes that risked their lives on 9/11 without thinking whether it affected them or not – call us to do better, to do more.

The heroes inside us do not require us to run into a building before it collapses. But they demand us to remember those who did, and those who could not be rescued. It is not physically a big lift, but it may be the hardest and the heaviest thing we are called to do because being a hero is hard work.

At the Port Authority, I am truly blessed to work with individuals who were there in 1993 and 2001. I am blessed to see individuals whose father or mother served at the Agency come to serve now because it is their turn, whether it be working in an office, at PATH, or as a member of the greatest police force in my humble opinion, the Port Authority Police Department.

And like so many of you, I am blessed by my family, watching a new generation move into its rightful place. It is a gift some families will never fully experience. So, 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing are personal. We should see that in our small frame. We do not need a big picture for that.

And we should 24 years later do what heroes did, and what heroes do: Serve and protect, heal and hold.

There is no greater way to honor service and sacrifice, than by freely offering both. May the memories of all we lost be a blessing.

Kevin J. O’Toole is the Chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

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Often, when we want to express a powerful emotion, we turn to roses. We fall in love; we send a dozen red roses. We express joy at birth – roses. Love and compassion after a passing – roses. Happy, joyous, sad, or profound – roses express all those emotions that so often cannot be put into words.

This week, there will be many moments to reflect on the tragedy of 9/11. It has been 24 years since that unimaginable Tuesday morning. More than a generation later, we will also reflect on the rebirth of the World Trade Center campus. We work alongside people who witnessed the tragedy and the rebirth, and now with people who were not even born on September 11, 2001.

As years pass, we think we are somehow supposed to be able to make sense of what happened, how we responded to it, and, also, understand where we are moving toward as that fateful day fades with memory.

The answers are elusive. That’s where the roses come in. They speak for us. And they speak for those who are no longer with us.

These cut flowers that have but precious little time to be both fragrant and beautiful are cherished, as we, who have grown older over these past twenty-four years, have learned to cherish the people we love and the people who matter in our lives.

They are cut roses. Beautiful. Sometimes, if touched the wrong way, painful, and like real roses, with us for a precious little bit of time.

There is a song written for a French film by the composer Michel Legrand. The lyrics were later rewritten in English by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the lyrics writing team known for songs like “The Way We Were.” But this song I am thinking of is called, “You Must Believe in Spring.” The great Tony Bennet recorded it, and I encourage you to give it a listen.

Part of a verse reads: “Beneath the deepest snows, the secret of a rose is merely that it knows you must believe in spring.”

That lyric speaks to us today and the Port Authority tradition of placing roses at the names of colleagues who perished on September 11, 2001, and during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

For the past four years, we, this family called the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, leave roses next to the names of the 84 people the Port Authority lost on 9/11, and in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This year’s Rose Ceremony was held on September 8th.

Each person attending the annual Rose Ceremony is handed a rose with the name of a person who perished during one of those tragic events. We walk to that person’s name etched in the bronze surrounding the pools, framing the shape of the original North and South towers. We place a rose at that name, and each year, I encourage all those participating to say that name aloud.

We say their names – the 84 we lost. We give them life as we reconnect their name to the person who lived that name.

We also leave roses at The Glade that marks the deaths of the valiant first responders, and the heroes who worked on The Pile, who died or became sick in the subsequent years following 9/11, and we leave roses in the Memorial Garden next to the St. Nicholas Greek Church and National Shrine, that gives honor to our Port Authority heroes who have succumbed to those same horrible illnesses.

At the Port Authority, we come together to celebrate, to grieve, to draw strength from one another, and, equally important, to draw strength from those who have come before us. We, the 8,000-strong people of the Port Authority today, are uplifted by the memories of the thousands who have served this agency for 104 years.

We do not have answers as to how something so horrific could have occurred. We will never have adequate words to console the families and friends of those lost on 9/11, in 1993, and over the subsequent years following the recovery effort at Ground Zero.

But we have roses that speak not with words, but with their precious beauty. They remind us of what is unique about each one of us – those who are lost and those who are left to move forward. In the days and months following those tragedies, the beauty of a rose seemed out of reach. They were cold, dark times. But the secret of the rose is that it knows to believe in spring, to a time of rebirth.

After the ceremony on Monday, September 8th, the names etched into the bronze that surround the footprints of the North and South towers, literally blossomed with the colors of the roses left behind.

The message is simple as we mourn, reflect, and move forward: You must believe in spring.

Kevin J. O’Toole is the Chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

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The controversial election contest in Hillside wound up moving more quickly than expected this morning after Superior Court Judge John Deitch set a speedy briefing schedule and a hearing for this Friday.

Deitch is now requiring attorneys to submit their briefs in a legal battle over council candidate Sonya McBurrows being thrown off the ballot by Thursday, and he could have a decision by the end of the week.

The lawsuit, filed on September 2, had originally been set by Deitch to be heard on October 3.  This morning, Deitch rescheduled it for September 15, before finally agreeing to a public conference with attorneys this afternoon and a hearing on September 12.

Township Clerk Rayna Harris removed McBurrows from the ballot – her lawyer, Jason Sena, says it was done without first advising her of a challenge, forcing her to file a lawsuit.

Sena argued that Harris didn’t thoroughly review the voter rolls; one of the examples he cited was a signature from Bish. Tonnie Abrams, which the clerk rejected because there was no voter named Bish Abrams.  According to Sena, this signatory was Bishop Tonnie Abrams, a 77-year-old clergyman. Who has lived in Hillside for over 25 years.

But Deitch never took responsibility for initially ignoring an emergent application.  Instead, he pointed fingers: said he was never provided with a courtesy copy of the filing; that means he had to download it from the judiciary website.

Vote-by-Mail ballots go out on September 20.  Deitch has halted the printing of Hillside ballots pending his decision.

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