Steve Buscemi has been one of those people. Not the most important, not the most consequential, not the most heroic — the firefighters who died in the towers were more consequential, the first responders who spent months in the pile were more consequential, the advocates who fought for the Zadroga Act in the face of years of congressional resistance were more consequential. But he has been one of those people, reliably, across more than two decades. In a world that rewards the single dramatic gesture and quickly loses interest in the sustained, ordinary commitment, that consistency is worth naming and worth understanding.
The story of Steve Buscemi is not a story about a celebrity who showed his true colors in a crisis. It is a story about how identity persists, how communities hold their members even after the formal membership ends, and how the values deposited in a person by the institutions and communities they pass through can express themselves in ways that are years in the making. The bucket brigade on September 12, 2001 was twenty-one years in the making. What followed it has been twenty-three more years in the building.
That is the story. It is not finished.