This
is a terrible, dark time for America, an anxious time for our
extended Penn family, and a sad time for humanity.
Thousands
of innocent lives--each one irreplaceable and precious--were taken
in a wave of evil and destruction that we still are struggling
to comprehend.
Many
of us will know people whose lives have been taken or will be
forever altered.
Today,
we unite in mourning their deaths, and we pray for their families
and the injured to find the strength to pick up the pieces of
their shattered lives and carry on.
Gone,
too, is the sense of invincibility in which we took our personal
safety and national security pretty much for granted.
Now,
we must learn the hard way that we can take nothing for granted--that
life and every thing we truly hold dear in life are gifts to nourish
and cherish, for they can all vanish the next instant.
Today,
we are experiencing a range of emotions all strained to maximum
pitch. Evil again has been loosed upon the world, this time in
our own backyard that we thought was secure.
We are
filled with shock, anger, despair, anxiety, confusion, and grief--a
brew of understandable reactions that challenges our spiritual
beliefs and civic values.
However,
I have seen members of the Penn community and Americans everywhere
affirm those beliefs and values by unleashing the greatest weapon
against evil: our humanity.
I see
emergency personnel risk their lives to rescue fellow citizens
by the thousands.
I see
our entire Penn community standing together as one family--each
of us reaching out to help a friend or stranger in pain or need.
Through
each act or gesture of our humanity, we take one step toward resisting
evil and healing the wounds that evil has inflicted on our country
and world.
The course
of America's history has changed forever.
The world
we knew before the awful events of September 11, 2001, is gone.
But we have the power to transmute the most horrific national
catastrophe into a resolve for moral action that establishes the
primacy of goodness in the world.
We can
and we will emerge from this ordeal sadder, to be sure, but richer
in compassion and wisdom, and more determined to affirm the best
of our common humanity.
We come
together to mourn.
We stand
together…To heal.
We leave
together a community.
--
President Judith Rodin
