‘Homecoming of Heroes' ticker-tape parade honoring post-9/11 war veterans coming to NYC this summer
A ticker-tape parade honoring war combat veterans who served in post-9/11 wars is coming to lower Manhattan this summer, according to the mayor's office.
Dubbed the 'Homecoming of Heroes' and slated for July 6, the parade down the 'Canyon of Heroes' from the Battery to City Hall formally recognizes more than 2.9 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan following the September 11 terror attacks.
4 The parade will formally recognize more than 2.9 million Americans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan following the deadly September 11 attacks.
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The ticker-tape parade, set to be the first of its kind in a major US city, will offer 'a powerful opportunity to highlight the contributions that service members continue to make,' Mayor Eric Adams said during a fleet week event Thursday.
'It would pay tribute to the extraordinary service, sacrifice and resilience of the post 9/11 combat veterans who did so much to protect our city and our nation in the wake of the deadliest attack on our homeland since Pearl Harbor,' he added.
4 The ticker-tape parade is set to be the first of its kind in a major US city.
Getty Images
More than 7,000 American troops died in the wars and contingency operations, and another 53,436 were injured, according to New York City Department of Veterans' Services James Hendon.
Another 31,177 veterans died by suicide, he said.
'We're doing what we can to remember and never forget our people and their loved ones,' Hendon said.
4 Ticker tape raining down on vehicles during the Operation Welcome Home parade in 1991.
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The last ticker-tape parade was held in October for the New York Liberty, which celebrated the WNBA team's first championship win.
While actual ticker-tape from 'ticker' machines was originally used as confetti in the early days of the parades, the Downtown Alliance now provides bags of crinkled packing paper for the event.
Roughly 2,000 pounds of the paper – costing the alliance about $5,000 – was dropped on the seafoam-green party, which drew an estimated 80,000 attendees to lower Manhattan.
Scores of bags of confetti were doled out the day before the parade to about two dozen buildings along Broadway that requested them.
If the 'Homecoming of Heroes' is anything like the Downtown Alliance's other ticker-tape parades, the combat veterans will be memorialized in stone with one of over 200 of the alliance's granite sidewalk plaques along the 'Canyon of Heroes' sometime after the parade.
4 Iraqi Army Soldiers from the 4th Iraqi Army Division in Brassfield Mora, Iraq.
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The plaques are designed by Pentagram, who also designed One World Trade Center's engraved cornerstone, and are manufactured by a New York City-based architect.
'The whole process of ordering, lettering, shipping and installation takes about two to three months total,' a Downtown Alliance rep told The Post.
'This will be more than just a parade,' Adams said Thursday. 'It will serve as a symbol of belonging, of closure and of collective pride.
'It will be a sign that our veterans and their families matter to us – not just during the wartime they fight, but in the peacetime they help achieve.
'It marks a small seed of our gratitude and our commitment to them: the seed that allows us all to water the tree of liberty so that we can sit under its shade.'
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An Indiana University study that randomly assigned newly married couples to joint accounts, separate accounts or any arrangement of the couple's choice found that, after two years, the joint-account couples 'exhibited significantly greater relationship quality' than the other couples. Wilcox brings up both studies to illustrate the effects a family-first approach has on marriage and family life — implications that are not minor. While marital advice today often emphasizes personal me-time, personal identity forging and the pursuit of personal ambitions, couples who end up sharing more in common are more likely to report happier marriages. And it's not just money. According to a YouGov survey, couples sharing the same last name not only held a stronger sense of family identity, but were more likely to be happily married and less likely to have plans to divorce than those who didn't. Sharing names, turning down job opportunities that detract from marital obligations and making personal sacrifices for each other reflects selfless attitudes that make a big difference in marriage, according to the State of Our Unions Survey of 2022. After controlling for education, income and race, the survey found 'we-before-me' couples much more likely to report being 'very happy' in marriage and also more likely to say divorce is 'not at all likely' in the future than couples with a 'my own needs first' attitude. Marriages in which only one spouse takes on most of the selflessness, however, 'can run aground' according to Wilcox. The sacrifices need to be mutual. Writer Julian Adorney shares that 'my marriage to my wife works because both of us practice a sort of self-emptying love.' He goes on to critique the book,'The Value of Others,' which ultimately views marriage as a dying institution to be replaced by gig-economy relationships lasting not 'till death' but 'until this relationship no longer provides adequate value for us both.' Today, notions of sacrifice and selflessness must not only compete with transactional-economic models, but also with a plethora of demands that make up what Northwestern University Professor Eli Finkel labels today's 'All-or-Nothing Marriage.' Finkel's book by the same name explains that 21st century couples hold high expectations for a partner to 'be all things to them.' Such inflated expectations of personal gratification and self-actualization, Finkel acknowledges, create a fragile basis for lasting unions and could be considered a major force behind family instability rates. Yet the book has some blind spots. 'Something you will not find discussed anywhere in All-or-Nothing Marriage is the importance of sacrifice,' writes marriage and family professor Scott Sibley. Marriage expert Alan Hawkins emphasizes the importance of helping couples understand that there are seasons of life when most couples must live in the valleys, sacrificing some lofty ambitions to manage busy lives with children and work. Rather than working to find their highest fulfillment, he says, couples sometimes just need help to 'keep things good enough to make it through a stressful season of life together.' Demands for transcendence, wholeness, meaning, worth and communion within a single relationship, theorized Sarah K. Balstrup in an insightful study, burdens romantic relationships with a host of needs formerly satisfied through religion. Relationships, she writes, 'have become the primary mythology of the sacred in the collective tongue' of Western culture; however, mere mortals have difficulty providing the needs that religion and God formerly satisfied. Wilcox's 'Get Married' book delves into the ways religious affiliation meets the higher needs of couples while prioritizing values like selflessness, fidelity and the worth of child-raising, according to an impressive array of research and data. To summarize, church attenders are significantly happier in marriages, less likely to divorce and are more satisfied with their lives in general. Moreover, religious couples exhibit greater sexual fidelity and commitment, and higher levels of relationship quality, including greater sexual frequency and satisfaction. Not all religious couples are happy, Wilcox acknowledges, but those who regularly attend church, mosque or synagogue tap into social networks that encourage self-denial and healthy marital interaction while discouraging behaviors that derail relationships. Add to that a meaningful sense of the cosmos and rituals that help couples deal with suffering (shared prayer is a predictor of higher quality marriages), and even a good–enough marriage with family-first priorities may not need to spend 24/7 on self-actualization to reach higher levels of happiness. In the divorce drama 'Kramer vs. Kramer,' the highest-grossing film of 1979, Dustin Hoffman's character Ted, whose wife has left him, gradually trades his workaholism for a deep father-son bond forged through countless meals, chores, conversations, and a harrowing trip to the emergency room. Ted's trajectory also includes a growing selflessness born of sacrificing for another's growth. When Ted faces an uphill battle for child custody, he sits down with a legal pad one night to weigh the pros and cons of keeping Billy. As the con list lengthens with exhausting annoyances, the pro list remains vacant until Ted slips into Billy's room and holds his sleeping child. After that, Ted calls the lawyer and says he's willing to fight for custody. The intangible benefits of having kids are difficult to calculate in the short-term, day-to-day frenzy of meal-making, mess-cleaning, tantrum-throwing and adult-child boomeranging that is child-rearing. Maybe that's why society's advantages vs. disadvantages list of having kids circa 2025 looks similar to Ted's — minus the tender child-hugging that wipes out the cons in the end. Wilcox explains that, amid the divorce surges of the 1970s, fertility levels fell below the replacement rate for the first time in United States history, only to rise to replacement level until around 2009. After that came a decade of ambivalence about child-bearing that saw cultural forces of individualism, hedonism and workism take precedence over kids, who limit, says Wilcox, 'options, choices, and freedom — and force us to grow up.' The 'Childfree Life' depicted in the iconic 2013 Time cover story replete with a vacationing couple on the beach became more appealing, as did more time spent at the office building careers. Currently, childlessness has now risen to the point that 1 in 4 young women today will have no posterity. Contributing to the perception that children aren't worth it may have been a 2016 study reporting that parents are 13% less happy than their childless peers. However, 'there is only one problem with this handwringing about parenthood,' Wilcox points out. 'It no longer fits the data ... today, that is most definitely not true.' Current research backs up this reversal. Parents, especially married parents, are more likely to report their lives are more meaningful and happier than nonparents while childless Americans are more likely to report their lives are lonely and less meaningful and happy. Indeed, 'today's men and women (ages 18 to 55) in their prime who have children report the greatest happiness and the most meaning in their lives,' writes Wilcox, 'even after controlling for factors like education, race, and ages.' Wilcox refers to psychologist Paul Bloom's insightful book 'The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning' to explain the paradox of children bringing both distress and happiness into parents' lives. While too much suffering can be debilitating, too little struggle in a life of pleasure and pursuits of the self leads to meaningless and unhappiness. The ups and downs of parenthood provide opportunities for adversity and stress — along with generous doses of meaning, compassion and greater selflessness that even medical studies correlate with 'authentic-durable happiness.' While marriages tend to see a dip in happiness as they transition into parenthood and the relationship becomes more strained, a review of literature on parenting finds that 'many initial challenges encountered at the time of new parenthood are transient in nature.' Marriages that were solid before the baby inserted itself into daily life usually remain solid, even with all the new stresses and sleepless nights. (It's marriages that were struggling before the transition to parenthood that are the ones most likely to see a significant dip.) 'The fact that more than three-fourths of adults already have or want to have children should itself be evidence that something very fundamental is at work,' writes James L. McQuivey, whose review of the research finds that more than a third of Americans wish they had more children than they currently have, and that 'an astonishing 88% agree that 'having children is one of the most important things I have done.'' Clearly, not everyone wants to or can become a parent. Reasons for not having kids are deeply personal and vary widely. While some may indeed want to sit leisurely on a beach, others, like Mother Teresa, prove that parents don't corner the market on selflessness. Many young adults feel ambivalent because their financial situations are too tenuous to buy a home or support a family, and still others wanted to parent, but infertility or life circumstances interfered. Catherine Rossi's poignant essay 'Not in the (Motherhood) Club,' describes her 20s full of work, a boyfriend and energy that somehow shifted in her 30s. 'With the seven-year guy long gone, I struggled to find another,' she writes, and then 'was hit full force in the face,' as her 30s became 40s, that 'there was a club.' Motherhood. And she would never be in it, feeling ostracized as everyone's lives began and continued to revolve around their children. No one should be stereotyped as selfish or feel ostracized for not having children, but a societal narrative that 'all parents are miserable' is not only untrue, but dissuades young adults from participating in what many find the most rewarding part of life. George Bailey. What a life. First the longed for dream of travel and Europe postponed, actually demolished, to salvage the family business and keep Bedford Falls from falling prey to Mr. Potter's evil machinations. Then marriage to Mary followed by multiple children — further imploding dreams of architecture, explorations and making it big. No wonder George questions, at a desperate juncture, whether his life is worth anything in Frank Capra's film classic 'It's a Wonderful Life,' as all his selflessness seems for naught. One of today's influencers might call George miserable, living in hell. It takes a hapless angel named Clarence to give George a vision of what his family and friends' lives would be like without his altruism (spoiler alert: pretty terrible). The movie ends with George surrounded by a grateful wife and thankful kids, relatives and a household full of friends. Mr. Potter, with money and power to make every wish come true, comes off as the truly miserable one compared to George's wonderful life. Maybe family-first, we-before-me selflessness offers its own angelic perspective during the desperate junctures of marriage and child-rearing, removing us from near-sighted annoyances and heartaches to give us the long view that sacrifices are worth it, and that hard times can bring out the best in us. Writer-surgeon Richard Selzer (1928-2016) was particularly adept at taking miserable medical situations and reframing them through the ennobling actions of a selfless spouse. In Selzer's essay 'Tube Feeding,' a husband tenderly ministers to a wife with an inoperable brain tumor, unable to eat. He devotedly carries out his daily duty when the feeding tube suddenly dislodges, so he nervously scrambles to reattach the tube, a nauseating process. Not wanting his wife to sense his distress, the husband discreetly hurries to a bathroom where she hears him throwing up. In another Selzer essay, he must cut a small nerve to remove the tumor in a woman's cheek — leaving the young wife with a twisted, clownish mouth. As Selzer encounters his patient and her husband back in her hospital room, he asks himself, 'Who are they? ... He and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at each other so generously, greedily?' 'Will my mouth always be like this?' she asks, and Selzer replies yes, 'because the nerve was cut.' The wife remains silent, but the husband smiles and says, 'I like it ... it is kind of cute.' 'All at once I know who he is,' Selzer continues. 'I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.' This article is the fourth of a series on the future of marriage in America.
