Alex Wong: America will not lie quietly

The sun rose on Montague Street before the storm hit. But at 9:04 a.m., the light was beaten back over the horizon and the day succumbed again to night. In the midst of a new Brooklyn morning, the sun fell out of the sky.

"It's snowing in Brooklyn," said Brendan Stevens, pressing his palm against his window, watching the storm come from across the bridge. A blast and a stillness -- ash descending in deceptive slowness, unspeakable horror falling with a cruel softness.

A vision of the nuclear winter, the manifestation of fire and brimstone. But if only it were simply weeping and gnashing of teeth. If only it were just sadness.

Brendan can walk on his roof and see Manhattan across the river. Before, he could see the World Trade Center rising above all other buildings, cutting a strong silhouette -- America claiming a piece of the sky as its own. But in its place now is a tragic cloud lording over a skyline mutilated -- the Capital of the World castrated.

Across the river, the blue sky turned black. People leapt to their death. Screams were lost in a deafening crash, screams ultimately silenced.

A Manhattan resident turned away from his television to escape the horror for a moment, only to discover his balcony draped in blood: carnage flung 10 blocks away, a stain laid over the nation.

The country is mourning. The Brooklyn sky is crying.

It's not possible to conceptualize thousands dead. It's not possible to understand the magnitude of lives lost, of lives irreparably torn from routine. We weren't built to handle this kind of pain, this kind of anger. In God's design, He didn't account for this. In His goodness, He didn't plan for such wrong. Things like this weren't supposed to happen.

But they have, and they cut the daylight hours short yesterday, halted the eternal motion of the earth. We can never again take up the timeline we were on, never head into that more peaceful future now ruptured. Yesterday was a turning point. We're on a different course now. Things have changed.

Yes, downtown Manhattan will one day be cleared of the rubble. One day, there will be no physical sign of this attack. But what will not be erased is this memory, a building that is the symbol of our glory tumbling to the ground -- an image burned into the nerve center of our being.

The image is a dark singularity, dense with the collective story of each individual pain. The pain of not knowing about the safety of our friends. The pain of unanswered phone calls. The pain of phone calls answered with the words, "I'm sorry..."

We drop with the building to the ground, dropping to our knees in prayer. Dropping prostrate in tears.

Things have changed.

But this country -- one divided between Democrat and Republican, between liberal and conservative, between opinion and counter-opinion -- is united under one banner as Americans. In times like these, we're reminded of that truth. In times like these, it is never more evident.

We have been thrown violently into war, a war brought by a phantom enemy. We will respond. We will find and defeat this enemy. This act will not go unpunished.

In all of history, there has been no country that parallels the benevolence of the United States. But this nation, capable of the greatest good will and the greatest love, is also capable of the greatest wrath. The sleeping giant has been woken again, and it will throw those responsible into the same hell they have brought upon us.

America will not lie quietly. The point of these attacks was twofold -- to scare us and to cripple us. They'll succeed in neither. While the terrorists were successful in hurting us, we will strike back harder, we will come back stronger and our American way of life will live on.

In the darkness under this cloud, in the middle of this storm, America has been changed, but we have not been vanquished. We will remember and we will endure.

Our banks are still running and our schools will open tomorrow. People will go back to work and the shows on Broadway will undoubtedly go on. Here at Penn, Hemo will still smile, Bobby Koch will still tell his jokes and we'll still party on the weekends.

And on Montague Street in Brooklyn, the sun will rise again.

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