|
 t's
Tuesday morning in a New York firehouse, and about 10 firemen are
gathered around a table in the back room drinking coffee. It's been
four months since they lost a number of their colleagues from this
firehouse in the September 11 disaster, and remembrances of the
dead — flowers, cards, yellowing newspaper articles —
hang on the wall. A visitor stops by and asks the men if they would
be willing to talk about the racial controversy over the statue
commissioned by Fire Department of New York brass, and which will
soon be installed at Fire Department headquarters.
"As long as you don't give the name of our company or any of
our names," says one. "Look, we just got rid of one of
the most vindictive fire commissioners [Thomas Von Essen, who was
widely disliked by the FDNY rank and file] we ever had, a guy who
thought nothing of moving guys around or punishing him just because
he didn't like what they had to say. And not only did he take it
out on the people, he would take it out on their sons when they
got on the job."
One of the firemen explains that the guys, all of whom are white,
don't want to be pilloried as racists for their opposition to the
statue. The 19-foot bronze image is based on the famous newspaper
photograph of three firemen raising Old Glory over the smoking ruins
of the World Trade Center. Those firemen happened to be white. The
FDNY leadership approved a change in the statue, which will now
depict a white man, a black man, and a Hispanic man, in the interest
of diversity.
OK, fine, the visitor says. You won't be ratted out. Now, fellows,
what do you think about the statue?
"As far as taking a scene from history, that shouldn't be altered,"
says one fireman. "You'll get this from every firehouse. Everybody
feels the same way."
"That's right. [The FDNY leadership] made a race issue out
of it, where before there was nothing like that. If they had just
built the statue the way it was, nobody would have said anything,"
says another. "Those firemen [in the photograph] didn't even
want recognition. Just seeing their faces was probably enough for
them. Then they turned around and said, 'Guess what, we're going
to use you on the monument, but your face isn't going to be there,
all because of political correctness."
A third fireman chimes in. "If they wanted to make this kind
of monument, they could've taken the Twin Towers, and could've had
the people lined up around it, all the emergency workers, all the
ethnic groups in that monument, sort of like what they did with
the Vietnam Memorial Monument down in Washington, DC. With this,
they took an actual picture of what happened and changed the ethnic
background just out of political correctness. You know what, that's
wrong.
"Is the Iwo Jima memorial next? Is Mount Rushmore next? Will
we have to have another face on Mount Rushmore to satisfy the ethnic
minorities in this country? Are they going to have to take Thomas
Jefferson off Mount Rushmore because he owned slaves?" he continues.
"That's not the way history goes. First of all, it's not going
to help race relations. If anything, it's going to ignite more resentment
against other people. It's definitely done that in the white community.
Enough is enough. When is it going to stop?"
Aren't most New York's firemen Irish or Italian?
"It's not a matter of Irish or Italian," says a fireman.
"If there were three black firemen raising that flag, and they
took a picture of that, then so be it. But that's not what happened.
You happened to have three firemen together who raised the flag,
and now they're changing it. Don't do that with one of our events.
Pick up your own statue. Make your own design. What are you going
to make it from an actual picture for? Otherwise, go do it to Iwo
Jima next. I'm sure the Marines would be happy to have that done
to their monument."
Did they ask any of the rank-and-file firemen for their opinions
before altering the statue?
"They did this without any input from any of us," says
a fireman. "I didn't even know about this until they decided
to unveil it the other day. They've already spent over $180,000
on this, and then all of a sudden here it is, and they ask 'What
do you think about it?' Personally, not too much."
The men begin talking about Lawrence Guyot, a black activist who
appeared on Fox News's Hannity & Colmes last week to
defend the alteration of the statue. Guyot didn't win any converts
here to his point of view.
"I think activists should mind their own business. They have
no business in the Fire Department, making a race issue out of it,"
says one man, angrily.
"What business does that guy have on TV, spewing venom?"
says another.
The men say that most of them have worked their entire careers with
minority firemen, and say they've never had a moment's problem.
One points out that a number of the firemen from this firehouse
who died on September 11 were minorities.
One of the dead, says a fireman, "was one of the best firefighters
you'll ever meet. You got guys from here still working down there
on their own time to find him. This has nothing to do with not being
able to work with black guys."
"See," interjects someone, "the guys who died that
day didn't die as white men or black men or Hispanic men. They died
as firemen."
One fireman asserts that the FDNY leadership "tainted"
the issue "by injecting race into the controversy." Now,
they feel, objecting to what they see as the falsification of history
to serve socially desirable ends leaves them open to being thought
racist.
The New York fire department, it must be said, is overwhelmingly
white. These firemen say that you can't force minorities to apply
for the job, and that it would be morally wrong — and possibly
dangerous to the public — to alter the entrance requirements
for the sake of creating a more diverse workforce.
"Everything these days always has to be [racially] perfect,
by the numbers," they say. "Well, the department's 86
percent white. Well, that's civil service!" says one fireman.
Another, sitting at the table, says, "When I applied for this
job, I wanted it so bad. I trained for it. I worked out every day.
I busted my butt to get this job. I took the courses. Anybody could
do that if they wanted to. Anybody can take the civil-service exam."
The statue is scheduled to go up outside FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn
sometime this spring — unless an anti-statue petition drive
started among the FDNY late Tuesday by Brooklyn-based fireman Steve
Cassidy succeeds. But the surviving ranks of the fire department,
perhaps, will shun the monument erected in tribute to their 343
dead colleagues.
"I'm not going by that phony memorial. I refuse," says
a fireman. "It's incendiary. You are inciting more racial hatred
by doing this. You might make satisfy some people, like the Al Sharptons
and the Jesse Jacksons. But it doesn't do anything for the silent
majority. The silent majority in this country doesn't do much, but
they do speak in other ways. Eventually, it's going to come to a
head if you keep doing this all the time."
As he spoke, an alarm went off inside the firehouse, and half the
men rushed to their truck. In a flash, they were off, responding
to an emergency not as white men, but as firemen.
|
