Mr. Speaker, we are not here today to determine whether the events of September 11, 2001, should be memorialized. That process began immediately after that tragic day in truly American fashion, as spontaneous free expressions of grief and unity. Ribbons were pinned on chests. Old glory was hung from every post. Shared moments of silence, neighbors gathering on front stoops by candlelight, families and friends and total strangers joining hands, churches and football fields ringing of spacious skies and amber waves of grain.

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Over the last five years, states and cities, organizations and individuals throughout our Nation have chosen to commemorate that day - the sorrow and the heroism - in different tangible ways, with art and statues and structures that will long stand as reminders of our shared experience.

Now national efforts are underway, with Congressional support, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. The specific purpose of House Resolution 175 is to place the Congress on record supporting a memorial in New York City that will also be a memorial conceived, designed, and interpreted for our Nation as a whole.

It is appropriate that we do this.
The brutal attack upon our Nation was intended to be national in scope by its perpetrators. Ground zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville were scarred by an attack aimed at the whole of America. And so our national memorials will allow the American people to remember, and honor, and heal in the manner in which we were attacked - as one.

Further, this memorial should be national in scope because we have responded to these attacks - and we have overcome them - as one Nation. Mighty challenges persist, but we are meeting them. And, today, our liberty has remained intact. Our Nation is scarred - but our Nation prevails.

This was not always assured. As the Civil War raged on, Abraham Lincoln publicly contemplated the possibility that a Nation conceived such as ours might not long endure. We have

But through World Wars and a Great Depression, through painful social upheaval and a Cold War, and now through the attacks of September 11, our Nation has survived. A free people - free to believe as we wish, free to speak our minds, free to raise our children as we see fit - will endure. A resilient people, cherishing liberty and equality and the rule of law, will endure.

Tyrannies can be powerful, but they are brittle. They derive power from the denial of freedom. It is a power founded in the suppression of human potential and it cannot be sustained.

America, five years after this attack, is testament that a Nation conceived in liberty and equality will endure. It is a triumph of millions of Americans - but it is also the triumph of an idea larger than any one person, or any one Nation.

A memorial in New York should speak to this larger triumph and so we urge our colleagues to support this resolution.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.