The New Normal

Reported by staff writers Kris Axtman, Kim Campbell, Ron Scherer, Liz Marlantes, Stephen Humphries, Daniel B. Wood, and contributors Patrik Jonsson and Craig Savoye.

What's normal now in America? More civility, if you're Peter Giacobbi. The University of Florida professor used to hammer his brother about politics. But the events of Sept. 11 have put extreme-sport argument in a new perspective.

"It seems so petty, compared to these issues we're dealing with now," he says.

To Chris Lanciani, normal means more time for family. A signal-processing engineer from Washington, Mr. Lanciani had been working 60 to 70 hours a week. He also has an 18-month-old daughter. Watching her grow suddenly takes precedence. "I shouldn't procrastinate about the important things," he says.

Kathleen MacArthur has seen a surge of patriotism on campus. This semester, the class she teaches on the Vietnam War at George Washington University disliked the famous antiwar books of the period. "It's so different from what's going on around them, it's hard for them to relate to," she says.

One month after terror struck the United States, the nation is settling back into its routines. Sports are back. Movie theaters are jammed. The American flags on overpasses are still there - but many are dirty and half-torn, and look untended.

Retaliatory attacks against Afghanistan have set people on edge, as they brace for more news to come. An undercurrent of fear has even reached towns far from New York or Washington. The possibility of biological or chemical attack is something that only weeks ago seemed remote. Now perfectly normal people discuss the qualities of gas masks as if they were comparing the virtues of different SUVs.

Some of the changes predicted in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 haven't come to pass. Violence in entertainment seems as popular as ever. Congress didn't whoop antiterrorist legislation through, engaging instead in a serious debate on civil-liberties tradeoffs. Some Muslim Americans have been persecuted for being who they are. Most haven't.

Undeniably, the four hijacked jetliners destroyed more than buildings. They also ripped a hole in the US cocoon of self-absorption. Through that hole Americans now hear the noise of the world - the voices of those who hate the globe's lone superpower for what it does, and for what it is.

Perhaps the United States has entered a new age of seriousness of purpose. In the days and weeks since Sept. 11 - as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon burn in memory and the faces of the dead still jolt, like an arrow to the heart - the overwhelming reaction of ordinary people has been that it is now so easy for them to see what is - and what is no longer - important.

"America is now another nation," says Vartan Gregorian, former president of Brown University in Providence, R.I., and current head of the Carnegie Corp. in New York.

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The full effects of the events of Sept. 11 won't be known for years. Americans are still unsettled, even a bit haunted, by the spectacular terrorist attacks, if polls are any judge.

More than 4 in 10 US citizens say they remain depressed by the tragedies, according to a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this month. Seventy-five percent say they are worried about another terror incident.

Seventy-three percent say they continue to follow news updates very closely. Forty percent say they have had trouble sleeping in recent days.

There's a new sense of vulnerability afoot in the land. Neither the oceans nor $300 billion in military spending protected the United States from the deadliest day on its soil since the Civil War.

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