Sometimes the immensity of suffering is just too much to bear. So overwhelming that the mind just turns a chilled numb rather than burn out from the sheer horror of something like this. But that gives way, to rage, grief, and then to resolve. A resolution that no matter what, we will not let these deaths have been for nothing. That was the hope of the beasts that did it, we would recoil, shrink from fighting back. Then they would hit us again, and again, and again.....Driving us to collapse from fear and pain. Forcing us to submit.........

That was their plan. But if they had understood us at all, they would have known that was a pipe dream. What kind of nation are we? A nation of survivors, of fighters, of people who would NOT SUBMIT. We araise from people who fled tyranny rather than just submit, from people who survived that horrible journey from Arica in chains, who never had their spirit broken, and later, fought to win their own freedom in our bloodiest war. We come from peasant stock mostly, the humble peoples, the ones who always were stepped on, always abused by those with a gun. We come from the strong ones who said no, not my family, you can't have my children for fodder. They came here.

They were from every land, every culture, they were every creed and calling. We were rough and often banged heads, but together we forged a nation unlike anything mankind had ever known. Something new in history. A nation forged of a people saying You may not do this to me, and creating a government that allowed them to reclaim it when they felt the need. A Constitution that promised that we would be a nation of individuals, of people,.....not a herd, not a flock. We have leaders come and go, parties, trends, prejudices and failings. The Constitution endures........It defines us in every respect, and if you know how to understand that, you can understand us.

Our more sophisticated critics say we're warlike, that is a half truth. We are actually pretty peaceful, if left alone. And that is the phrase, left alone, it's all we've ever really wanted. To live and grow free of the war every generation of the tired old empires, to forget the religious bigotry and hate of the old world. We have our failings true enough, but they are our own, and we have learned to improve and move on.

So now the raging fanatics of Islam have choosen to wage war on us for being the leading example of the west. We exist outside their rules and that enrages them, a far greater sin, we thrive and flourish. Almost all the grievences they cite for the why of 9/11 can be laid at the feet of old Europe, the crusades, the petty fifedums of the middle east, those maps were drawn in London and Paris, not Washington. Yet we draw the hate, the rage of the street. So be it.

I said that the lament we are warlike is a half truth, here is the full one. We are peaceful, until our homes are threatened, our families, our children. Then my friends, the Gates of Hell itself cannot hold back our fury. We felt that threat before, and on Normandy Beach we paid for our freedom with thousands of our own lives. The cost of this war is already high, we have lost much, yet no one can reasonably say, we wouldn't have passed on 9/11 to avoid this war. We are determined and resolved, and we are ready to pay the price. We have before, and we won't turn away this time either.

I also mentioned new life, and that my friends is the ultimate victory. All around us families are bearing the next generation, a testement to life, to hope, to knowing we will win. Because there is nothing else left to us. In Iraq, and Afghanistan the first new children of a new age are being born. With the hope they will not be the fodder and carrion of the next Jihad, that tired old fanatics in robes won't sell their lives for false pride. They are the hope and redemption of a people who have suffered too long.

So it comes to this, starting in death, yet returning to life, new and untainted by the sins of the fathers.

If we can give them this gift, then the dead of 9/11 will have meaning, a catylist in the birth of a new beginning. That isn't a bad legacy, it's a sad and mournful one, but really the only good that can come of their deaths.

New life, and hopefully, new freedom. God Bless them all.