2011奥巴马纪念9.11演讲.doc

THE PRESIDENT:? The Bible tells us -- “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”?Ten years ago, America confronted one of our darkest nights.? Mighty towers crumbled.? Black smoke billowed up from the Pentagon.? Airplane wreckage smoldered on a Pennsylvania field.? Friends and neighbors, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters –- they were taken from us with a heartbreaking swiftness and cruelty.? And on September 12, 2001, we awoke to a world in which evil was closer at hand, and uncertainty clouded our future.?In the decade since, much has changed for Americans.? We’ve known war and recession, passionate debates and political divides.? We can never get back the lives that were lost on that day or the Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in the wars that followed.?And yet today, it is worth remembering what has not changed.? Our character as a nation has not changed.? Our faith -– in God and in each other –- that has not changed.? Our belief in America, born of a timeless ideal that men and women should govern themselves; that all people are created equal, and deserve the same freedom to determine their own destiny –- that belief, through tests and trials, has only been strengthened.?These past 10 years have shown that America does not give in to fear.? The rescue workers who rushed to the scene, the firefighters who charged up the stairs, the passengers who stormed the cockpit -- these patriots defined the very nature of courage.? Over the years we’ve also seen a more quiet form of heroism -- in the ladder company that lost so many men and still suits up and saves lives every day, the businesses that have been rebuilt from nothing, the burn victim who has bounced back, the families who press on. Last spring, I received a letter from a woman named Suzanne Swaine.? She had lost her husband and brother in the Twin Towers, and said that she had been robbed of, “so many would-be proud moments where a father watch