Robert Torricelli: “Mr. President, I want to engage my colleagues and the American people in a discussion of the events of September 11…”

“Mr. President, I want to engage my colleagues and the American people in a discussion of the events of September 11, 2001. All of us recognize that much of our lives have been touched and some things have been changed forever. If it is axiomatic to say that about our country and the communities I represent and where I live in northern New Jersey, it may be as true as anywhere in the Nation. There is not a small town or a city in northern New Jersey that has not been touched or changed. At the time the final body has been found and the search has concluded, 2,000 to 3,000 people in New Jersey may have lost their lives. It is estimated there are 1,500 orphans in my State. It struck everywhere. In Middletown, NJ, 36 people have been lost. It is estimated it could go as high as 70. In Basking Ridge, where Jon Corzine and I visited a few days ago, 14 people were lost, two more than in all of World War II. In a single elementary school in Ridgewood, NJ, 6 children lost their fathers. The loss of lives in Korea or Vietnam or World War II took years to accumulate. In my State of New Jersey, lives were lost in minutes. We say the Nation will never be the same. We say that life has changed. Those are words. We do not know what they mean. All we can attest is that it is large, it is dramatic, and things will be different. Now we fill in the blanks. How will it be different and why?”