As I write this, it is Wednesday, September 12. That is, yesterday was September 11, a day we must never forget — or forgive. Although you won't be reading this until October, it is impossible for me to not write about the tragedy we have faced. If you were hoping for an essay on technology and insurance, I apologize.
I spent the first 33 years of my life in the New York area, and I have many friends and family there. All, thankfully, safe. But everything has changed.
By the time you read this, I hope, we will have responded to the attacks against us with an unprecedented show of force-one that will shock the world to the same degree that yesterday's destruction did. I want the world to say, "I didn't think America was capable of that." I want historians to debate in 50 years whether we did too much.
Like many of us, I put my trust in our leaders to do the right thing at the right time-but, I hope, not the good thing. It is not time to be the good guys. There is no way we can get justice. We will have to settle for revenge. So be it.
The institutions that support these wanton attacks against civilians must be made to feel the fury of the most powerful military force in the history of the world. Whether sovereign governments or independent organizations, they must not be damaged; they must be removed from the earth. We need to ensure that they cease to exist in any coherent form.
Like all dramas and all tragedies, this too will play out. We will go on-inexorably changed, but we will go on.
And that is the most important thing: That we do not let the acts of animals change who we are. I am proud to be an American not because of our geographic location or because a particular flag flies overhead, but because of the freedom, pride, energy, and goodness that are at the core of what it means to be a citizen of the United States. We must not sacrifice those things.
It is easy and understandable to cry for summary executions, guilt by association, and indiscriminate attacks on apparent culprits. But that is not the American way. Our response need not be measured, but it must be directed-properly, accurately, and carefully. We must show those who carry out these acts and those who condone them who we are and who we can be. They must understand without a shadow of a doubt that the price for being our enemy is devastatingly high.
But they must also witness the other greatness of America: the part that goes on in the face of terrible adversity, that rises above and beyond the call of any duty, that says that nothing stops us.
We can be hurt, but the ideals of America cannot-must not-be stopped by tyrants, madmen, or fools.
America prevails.
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