He was also, still, the former firefighter from Engine Company 55. The two identities — working-class kid from the outer boroughs who had driven a fire truck through Little Italy, and one of the most versatile character actors of his generation — were not contradictions. They were aspects of the same person, formed in the same city, expressing the same quality of attention to the specific and particular reality of the world in which they operated.
## The Ordinary Persistence of Commitment
There is a concept in community psychology sometimes described as “ordinary heroism” — the accumulation of small, consistent acts of commitment that, viewed across time, constitute something more significant than any individual act would suggest. The phrase is designed to distinguish the kind of sustained ethical behavior that most communities depend on from the exceptional dramatic acts that narrative tends to celebrate. Most of what holds a community together is not the exceptional; it is the persistent.
Steve Buscemi’s relationship to the FDNY community over the twenty-plus years since September 11 is better described by this concept than by the language of heroism that commonly attaches to his Ground Zero work. He showed up to the rubble in 2001 — dramatic, visible, the moment that gets the headline. He showed up to the City Hall protest in 2003 — less dramatic, less visible, no headline. He showed up to the Breezy Point cleanup in 2012 — unglamorous physical work, the same thing he had done on a larger scale eleven years earlier. He helped make a documentary in 2014. He joined a board. He executive-produced a film about dust. He gave a twenty-year accounting of his experience.