This week, we had an opportunity to sit down with some of Portland’s finest high school students to discuss questions about what it means to be an American and what America’s values represent. Our conversation was organized by the American Bar Association as part of its Dialogue on Freedom campaign, a nationwide program conceived by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy that has engaged more than 75,000 high school students in similar discussions across the country.

Our focus was on defining the fundamental values and traditions that unite us as Americans so that we can better understand ourselves. This effort, like so many others, was born of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington; born of our collective national effort to make sense of the most senseless of acts. If our youth can better understand what it means to be an American and what it is that we stand for, they can better represent our society as they set their course in the world.

And who better to represent us than our own children and grandchildren? Indeed, our young are our greatest ambassadors. Through exchange programs, studies abroad, and Internet chat rooms, they are the most energetic and hopeful face of America. They are the ones who best carry the message of what America is and what we, as Americans, represent. Our conversation in Portland was but one small part of a national effort to better prepare students for this role.

Nothing could be more important. The war on terrorism is at its most basic level a battle of ideas. It is a question of whether equality and opportunity will prevail over intolerance and inequality, whether hope and freedom will prevail over violence and destruction.

Unfortunately, too few of us fully understand what it is that makes our nation great and its people unique. Too few of us understand that the legal system established to protect our rights and freedoms-liberties that are themselves unique – is the envy of the world, or that our system of democracy is modeled the world over. Most importantly, too few of us recognize that the war on terrorism is not limited to Washington and New York, but is fought out by every one of us, every day in communities like Bangor, Lewiston and Augusta. We should never forget that two of the Sept. 11 hijackers began that fateful day in Portland.

If we have any hope of winning the clash of values that is at the heart of the war on terrorism, we must ensure that our children understand what we are fighting for as well as what we are fighting against. This is precisely why we, as Mainers, were delighted by the opportunity to sit down for a Dialogue on Freedom with some of our state’s brightest students. We hope others will follow our example in communities here in Bangor and elsewhere across the state. We are positive that they would find the experience as rewarding, as reassuring and as uplifting as ours.

But more importantly, we hope the students with whom we met walked away from that discussion with a better understanding of their heritage as Americans, of their society’s values, and of the responsibilities that these bring. If so, we are confident that they will continue Maine’s tradition of putting forth the best our nation has to offer, and that our nation will ultimately defeat the forces of global terrorism.

Gov.-elect John E. Baldacci, a four-term congressman representing Maine’s second district, will be sworn in as the 72nd governor of Maine in January. Robert Hirshon is the immediate past president of the American Bar Association.