(Reinspired by the model first response of our brave public servants to this challenge.)


NITED States of America. That's who we are. Terrorists, cowards plotting from shadows behind women and children, crawling out from underneath their rocks or hiding in caves, can't take away one thing from this unity which binds each of us to one common dream: Freedom.

We've met greater challenges to it before. We've drowned, starved, bled, fought just getting over here. We took a wilderness, one that sometimes took some of us, and planted our feet and crops firmly in its soil. Cut off from our former homes by oceans that we spent months crossing, we had to carve out our own civilization literally from scratch. We started out only with what meager supplies our finite number of fragile boats could carry inside their holds, along with ourselves. Many arrived free. Many bound in indentured servitude or in chains. We built up villages. Then provinces. And finally states.

We kept our ties to the mother country for as long as we could. While we were building she called us her colonists. She prospered so much from our incomparable labors that she refused to let us go once we were ready to strike out on our own. Our freedom demanded that we answer such refusal with our removing her from our land and lives. She possessed the mightiest navy and among the strongest, most well equipped armies in the world to back up her decision to keep us bound. She counted also on the pockets of inhabitants who sought more the advantages of comfort than of freedom. All of them together couldn't stop us. Through blood and toil we earned our right to be free and independent states.

We stopped, also, the most forceful effort ever to divide that unity which ours or any country could face: dissolution from within. Americans, the fiercest of all fighters for a cause, set out to decide in a bloody struggle between themselves the justness of a separate or a united freedom. Our union decisively prevailed. It became even stronger and has remained so ever since.

We leapt to the defense of others' freedoms during three, now four global wars, expanding our own freedoms through the sacrifices that our sons and daughters made and are making on behalf of those of our friends. We helped many keep their freedoms, and even more gain theirs. Because we know that a freer world always leads to a much freer America.

When we shout "Bring it on!" that's what we mean. That's who we are. United in freedom and against every threat to it. No election-year bickering, no second-guessing hand-wringing by any of our allies, no anthrax-laced packages, no smoldering rubble at Ground Zero, no fantasy of Islamofacist nazis succeeding at anything other than dying in ignominy and dying out as a completely rejected malignancy which otherwise would enslave humanity under fear and tyranny, can ever diminish it. We've accepted this challenge like we have every other that has faced our nation. Freedom unites us, drives us, gives us the greatest strength, the greatest sense of duty, of justness and rightness in our cause. We know, too, that the only way the terrorists can defeat us is if we let them.

If fact, we aren't allowing them the chance anymore. No wind of change can ever stir more than our flag and our desire to fight under it for all that she represents. Nor are we alone. We are with every human being who yearns for freedom everywhere across the globe. For those still toiling under the decreasing number of regimes now supporting and sponsoring terrorists, help is literally on the way. One particularly, the main culprit, sees gloom in all the freedom growing up around it among formerly brutalized peoples. Internally it's trying to disabuse its own people of the dream that they too can enjoy the same rights and dignities. That's a dream no dictatorship has ever been able to slow down, much less stop from coming true. No terrorist any may harbor can assist it in stopping this dream. Seeing it come true is the dictator and terrorist's worst nightmare. Even trying to eliminate the dreamers won't stop it from waking all nations to the dawn of freedom that we're privileged to be thankful witnesses of all across the Middle East and other troubled lands.

Let those who hold out only death and fear for all know that totally defeating each and every one of them is our duty, honor, and pride. Always has been. Always will be. We were born taking that stand. We live to take it. We are ever willing to fight and if needs be die for the cause of freedom. It is a cause in which we the people will always remain strongly united.

Bring it on.

	4:32 AM

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