Tonight we gather as a community to share the grief of the over 200 hundred families whose lives have been forever changed.

We gather as a community to reflect on what this means to us all, to our nation and our world.

We gather as a community to affirm our belief in ourselves, our nation and in the basic goodness of the human spirit.

It is hard after all the speeches and ceremonies, the photographs and television specials to again expose your heart to the pain we first felt.

It is hard - to - when we think of the enormity of our loss not to have grown numb. We retreat to platitudes because the exhaustion of our raw emotions has grown too great.

Tonight, we open our hearts again. We mourn for each human being lost as an individual. We remember that each person born into this world is a gift, representing something new; something unique that had never existed before and is now gone.

Each photograph we see in the newspaper's special editions represents so much more, they represent a family who now misses the love of a spouse, the kiss of a child, the laugh of a loved one.

So tonight let us again offer to share ourselves, to help ease the pain of each family who has been so brutalized. We commit tonight, to visit someone we know, to help a child, to say a prayer.

But like the families who must each day move on through their tears, the families that must pay their bills, give their children hope and continue to celebrate life while in the midst of so much pain, let us move forward.

Let us remember that this is a special time in our nation's history, when people have come together in a way that has been absent for decades. The meaningless distraction from September 10 a year ago, supplanted, in part by a new commitment to matters public, to faith in God, in our nation and in each other.

Let us take from that new commitment to the public good, an energy to make things better. Here in our hometown of Nassau County, in our State and throughout out nation and the world.

Who are we to be? How will this generation of Americans make our world better? What will be our cause, our devotion, our memorial to theses honored dead.

Let it be said that September 11th will be a day we recall all the pain that has been visited upon is all, but let it also be said that September 11th is the day we devote ourselves to the families of those that were lost, and we begin our journey to a better community. We begin our journey to a better nation. On September 11th we begin our journey toward a better world. On September 11th we recall the great gift of our lives. We thank God for that gift and rededicate ourselves to the rebirth of the miracle that is America.

From our collective pain let us grow.

The Poet Aeschylus wrote:

Nassau County's 9/11 Memorial Project