A Steel Stronger Than Fear

Editor's note: The following editorial appeared in the Thursday, May 5, edition of the Echoes-Sentinel.


The death of Osama Bin Laden on Sunday, May 1, came not in some cave in the rugged Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, living the life of a fake monastic mendicant, but rather in a fortified, walled-in $1 million compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a suburb of Islamabad. And so, the long, frustrating search for the world’s Public Enemy Number 1 is finally over.
Thank goodness.
Now comes the aftermath, the dealing with the half-life of the hatred he spun. We must live with the hatred breaking down like a particularly foul quantity of spent nuclear fuel rods, destined to lose their destructive potency over years, decades, and even longer.
Still, there is a truth that we can all hold onto and nurture, like an aloe vera plant for the body, mind and spirit. It is a steel stronger than fear. It is goodness.
It is the faith, the hope and the love we pay forward, we spread every day by doing the simple things of civil society, the simple things that taken together nurture life as it ought to be lived, life as it was meant to be lived. We defeat Bin Laden over and over again every day when we live as individuals contributing to a collective.
This year, both Warren Township and Watchung will receive portions of the steel from the World Trade Center, which each town will fashion into 911 monuments of remembrance. Volunteers from both towns are designing attractive monuments so that all generations can honor the steel that was stronger than fear.
The steel symbolizes the strength that was exhibited by the innocents on 911. They are the office workers, the coffee shop and restaurant cooks, the cleaning service personnel, the administrative assistants as well as the corporate executives, and of course the firefighters, the police and the emergency medical technicians who died at the World Trade Center. It is their spirit that is a steel stronger than fear.
For years, folks have been visiting the Tower of Remembrance at the Shrine of St. Joseph in Long Hill Township. The tower is fashioned from World Trade Center steel.As folks will come to see in Warren and Watchung, the steel will have a way of attracting folks to come and honor the victims of 911 each in their own way. They’ll honor the folks who died in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a farm field in  Pennsylvania.
They will also be honoring those who lived on after 911, families of victims, and the rest of well-meaning Americans and friends of Americans around the country and around the world, who know all about a steel stronger than fear.
It’s a steel also found in classrooms every school day and in after-school programs when a teacher reaches a student’s mind and gives insight to a truth that will be a part of their value system for the rest of their lives.
It’s a steel when folks hold doors for one another going into the convenience store, when folks visit loved ones in nursing homes, when folks organize garage sales, church bazaars, cookie and cupcake sales for good causes, and when folks go to the fireworks displays at the Warren Lions Expo and the Christmas Tree lightings at the Watchung Circle and the Meyersville Circle.
It’s a steel in a the late, great Watchung Firefighter Claude “Red” Ford, 91, who died on Tuesday, March 29, 2011, and whose memorial service will be held at 11:30 a.m., this Saturday, May 7, at Wilson Memorial Church, Watchung.
Mr. Ford was a steel stronger than fear if ever there was one. Watchung Councilman Steven Black, owner of Gray’s Florist, Route 22 East, Watchung, said every spring around this time, Mr. Ford would come in, without fanfare, without any awareness that anyone was noticing, to buy bunches of loose flowers, and place them on the graves of fallen Watchung firefighters. Anonymously, like a true mendicant, with a generosity of spirit more valuable than gold, and with faith, hope and love in his heart, he was just doing what he would do naturally. He was just doing what was right. He was remembering those who had done before what he was doing now.
He was showing us all what it means to be a steel stronger than fear.

For Essays And Editorials
Denis J. Kelly
May 5, 2011