Good and evil almost never express themselves as harshly and clearly as they did Tuesday morning. People we don’t know slaughtered people we do, and they did it with contemptuous calm. Yet, even as clouds of dust and smoke rose from the rubble, even as family members tortured by hope and doubt took to the streets with pictures and pleas, even as mobs celebrated in Gaza, Cairo, and Baghdad, something shook itself sluggishly to life and that something is a sense of ourselves. Kindness flourished amid the flames: a couple carried a disabled man down 68 flights of stairs, a priest crouched to give last rites as a mighty tower collapsed, and the hand of God closed above him. A man and woman, their hope gone, held each other and leaped. A solitary candle, a flag, a tear. These are the tokens of our renewal.

The United States had a spirit before it had a name—one of faith and freedom, of ambition tempered by piety. We once were a nation of neighbors and friends, we are again today. We once were a nation of hardship-tested dreamers, we are again today. We once were a nation under God, we are again today. Our enemies attacked one nation, they will encounter another. For they underestimated us. Today in our grief and in our rage, our determination and hope, we’ve summoned what’s best and noblest in us. —We are again Americans.