“He Was A Good Jake” – by Michele McPhee
It is inevitable; a Godly law of sorts, that weather will be chaotic when we mark the Last Alarm of a firefighter with his funeral service. The rains are often torrential. Or maybe the sun is blinding through unnaturally blue skies. Sometimes winds are so fierce, the hats of the mourners are blown right off their heads.
This morning, it was pellets of ice that hurtled into the mourners outside the South End’s sprawling Cathedral Catholic church who gathered to remember 39-year Boston Fire Lieutenant Bob “B.K.” Kilduff.
The dinging of the ice rocks on car hoods accompanied the skirling of bagpipes as politicians, firefighters and loved ones crowded into the church. All of them walked past Kilduff’s fire helmet, battered and rusty from his nearly four decades of service to this city, held aloft by a lone firefighter in at the top of the church steps. The helmet’s numbers, 2-3, were blackened by acrid smoke and banged up from the rescues of children and elderly from flames; dented from the collapses and explosions and unforeseen dangers that can strike a firefighter at any time while working on the line.
It was Bob Kilduff’s helmet that made me angry this morning. Angry that Barack Obama thinks he could be my President despite having befriended a hateful bigot who, just days after the World Trade Center towers fell, stood at a pulpit screaming “the chickens have come home to roost” and blaming foreign policies of this country for the cowardly slaughter of 3,000 Americans in New York City, in a field in Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon on 9-11 2001. At the very moment that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was screaming, guys like Bob Kilduff were digging - crawling through the rubble for the missing. And then they carried out the bashed helmets of the 343 New York City firefighters who rushed into the towers to pull off the largest rescue in this country’s history but would never emerge from the rubble of the towers.
As the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was ranting about Americans and whites and Jews; the children, wives, parents of those 343 slain firefighters were in churches or mosques or synagogues with nothing but a torn bunker gear coat, or a badge, or a patch to remember their lost. They honored this country, never disparaged it. Today, empty helmets are being carried by the families of emergency responders that continue to be felled by the poisonous toxins sucked in that terrible morning; breathed into their lungs at the exact moment Jeremiah Wright was using his lungs to scream hateful propaganda that suggested we brought 9-11 on ourselves.
One month before Kilduff died he was at a union event representing Boston jakes as the Vice President of Local 718, the union that represents firefighters. There he told the assembly, “We stood together in good times and in difficulties.” And Kilduff was right.
That is exactly why I am so raised up about Barack Obama and his minister. The divisive rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright should have been condemned by Obama long before he was shamed into delivering “The Race Speech” in Philadelphia this week (a large portion of which was I thought read more about ‘’why the working-class whites are angry’’ rather than as a much-needed explanation on why the Senator not only attended the church, but financially supported it with a check in 2006 for $22,500.)
No man of honor would tear down his own, his compatriots, like Wright did four days after 9-11. The attacks were an opportunity for all ministers, pastors, rabbis, clerics to truly exemplify what has now become a campaign slogan made famous by our governor: “Together We Can.”
Now that slogan is "just words," to plagarize, borrow, whatever, another Patrick/Obama campaign speech.
Wright would have been better served by turning to the work of FDNY Fire Chaplin Mychal Judge – the first man to die on 9-11, and a recovering drunk who helped scores of alcoholics from every background and ethnicity achieve sobriety. That’s my definition of a spiritual advisor – which is what Rev. Jeremiah Wright was to the Barack Obama campaign
Barack Obama’s speech on race in America will become a historical one, but it wasn’t enough to explain how he came to embrace a man whose views on bigotry were so damning. And it didn’t explain why he lied to the American people by telling us that he never heard Wright's hate mongering, the second lie in as many months from the Obama camp. The first was about the call to Canada about NAFTA which Obama only came clean about after confronted with a memo.
Boston Fire Lt. Bob Kilduff liked to tell “his boy” – his son Bobby, also a Boston firefighter – that “no matter what the situation, there is a way of leaving it better than you found it.” That’s how Kilduff lived his life, going as far as to scribble legislation on scrap paper during the last days of his life. His good friend and Local 718 President Ed Kelly said it best: “B.K. died a warrior’s death.”
But in my view Barack Obama’s race speech did not leave me feeling any better about the fact that he brought a guy like Wright into the inner circles of our government. It’s a question of integrity. “Show me your friends I’ll show you who you are,” is an adage that many of our mothers swore by.
Well, today Bob Kilduff’s friends crowded into a Boston church while Barack Obama’s friend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continued to insult the memories of all the emergency responders who laid down their lives in service to this country. And Barack Obama continued to insult our intelligence with the lazy lie: I didn't know.
