The September 11th attack
Tragedy brings out true spirit of 'Gen-X'
By Gregg Barrett
Gannett News Service
NEW YORK — Darren Strickner is 800 miles from home with a week's worth of canned food and a Jeep to sleep in. He's never done anything like this. Never even been to New York.
Associated Press
So it is difficult for him to explain why he drove here alone from Lansing, Mich., and is asking complete strangers if he can help.
A passer-by drops $20 into a donation boot for the New York Fired Department at a multi-agency disaster relief drive yesterday at Edison International Field in Anaheim, Calif.
"I'll do anything. I came to work," said Strickner, 32, idle and frustrated two hours after arriving Saturday night. "Something just told me I had to be here. I had to come. I had to help ... Where can I help? Do I sign up?"
The smoldering crater in New York's skyline is drawing waves of volunteers who descend as if on a pilgrimage. More people than the rescue effort can handle. And none more so than the 20-something to 30-somethings dubbed "Generation-X," that latchkey product frequently depicted as Nintendo-addled and Web-obsessed.
"You mean the generation that made the dot-com world happen," said Stanford graduate Manoella Gonzalez, 24, clearly offended by the stereotype.
Late on Saturday night, Gonzalez, who says she might normally have been bar-hopping, offered free massages to police, firefighters and construction crews. She kneaded shoulders from a kitchen stool placed outside the Javits Convention Center, a relief headquarters two dozen blocks removed from Ground Zero.
It is from there to here that many of the men and women in hardhats emerge looking like coal miners, their grave faces lined with the soot.
It is also here that Steven Ross, 64, opens a Salvation Army truck, then steps back and watches the kids take over. He estimates 75 volunteers, none of whom he knew before, have asserted themselves as custodians of this one truck.
"We've got everybody from a 14-year-old Egyptian girl to college students to young professionals," said Ross, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
There are hundreds more just at the center named for the late Jacob Javits, a legendary liberal Republican senator from New York.
They have come like Matthew Bine, 26, an ad salesman from Brooklyn who has earned the nickname "Water Man" for his work on a 6-foot high mountain of beverages. "I just walked up and took over for a guy whose back was hurting him," he said.
Like Richie Cuddihy, 32, and Jimmy Fioranelli, 34, best buddies volunteering from the construction unions of nearby Queens. They loaded and unloaded supply trucks all day, then slept Saturday night outside the Javits center.
"We still want to get down there and help," Fioranelli said, looking south toward the smoke that slowly abates. "We'll be back tomorrow."
Like Amy Adams, 29, a Duke graduate living in Manhattan who heard on the radio that rescuers needed instant coffee. She rushed out and bought 10 jars of Folgers.
"I was so excited to hear they needed coffee," she said. "Here was something I could do. I can't weld or do some of that other stuff, but I can do coffee."
She stood in a long line to give blood. She walked long lines carting drinks to the workers. And she has witnessed, from the rooftop of her office building in Manhattan, an assault she still cannot fathom.
Had the fiery demise of lives and buildings been caused by nature, it would be no less of a tragedy. But no one here argues that it would feel different, somehow less visceral.
"I watched those planes over and over on TV ... and I just had to get here," said Strickner, trying to explain his drive from Michigan.
"I don't have a specific skill, but I've done construction work and I've worked on farms and I've dealt with epidemics where all the animals were dead ... and I know I can help."
