By NANCY GIBBS

Posted Sunday, September 1, 2002; 3:38 p.m. EST
n anniversary can be sweet or solemn, but either way, it is only the echo, not the cry. From this distance, we can hear whatever we are listening for. We can argue that Sept. 11 changed everything—or nothing.

The country is more united, and less; more fearful and more secure, more serious and more devoted to American Idol. It is like looking at your child's baby pictures. You know exactly who it is: every feature is both different and the same, despite new expressions, and furrows and knowledge.

Holding two contradictory ideas in your head was supposed to be a sign of first-rate intelligence. Now it just feels like a vital sign. To say we have changed feels like rewarding the enemy, but to deny it risks losing the knowledge for which we paid a terrible price—knowledge about who we become under pressure, in public and private. People talked about living on a higher plane, with an intensity of fear and faith and gratitude, when it was easy to salute and hard to sleep and nothing was bland or phony or cheap. But we could not live there forever; it was like the day you graduate from high school or your first child is born or your father dies—days of power and insight that grab you for a moment and, when they let you go, leave marks on your skin.

What marks can we see now? President Bush says great good may come from the evil that struck, but you need a long lens to bring that hope into focus. We resist the idea that we have changed because so much of the change of the past year feels like damage. Lives have been lost or broken. Whole sectors of the economy are in intensive care. We talk about the need to balance freedom and security, but both have shriveled in the heat of the threat. There seemed to be a spirit of infectious virtue everywhere we turned a year ago; we have since looked from the pulpit to the boardroom to the baseball diamond and wondered if there was an honest man anywhere in sight.

So, having hardened the soft targets and stored some water and a flashlight, we try to move on as though nothing fundamental has been lost, head down the road in our gas-guzzling cars and not mind if there's a checkpoint along the way. The Fourth of July fireworks in Omaha, Neb., this summer culminated first in a proud, fiery, red-white-and-blue U.S.A., then in rockets that formed smiley faces, then peace symbols. Which mood best fits the moment? Berkeley, Calif., the antiwar town, is busy promulgating laws that would ban coffee that's not environmentally friendly. The most popular TV show for the year was Friends—whose Manhattan-based characters, notes Chicago Tribune TV critic Steve Johnson, "never seemed to realize the skyline had changed." Applications are up for both the Marine Corps and the Peace Corps; does that reflect good hearts or bad job prospects?

For a while last year, we All were One, stunned, numbed, crushed and inflamed. But the road forked somewhere, dividing those most directly affected from everyone else. It is one thing to choke up when we read the "Portraits of Grief" obituaries in the New York Times, another to wake up every morning knowing there's a pair of ski boots in your hall closet that will never be used again and decide whether this is the day you'll finally take off your wedding ring. Many may have had a burst of spiritual fuel, but that's not the same as having your minister suggest that God must have quite a plan for your life or he wouldn't have saved it, as a pastor told Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last survivor pulled from the hellfire. We all may want to be closer to our families, but consider Sergeant Randel Perez, who met his firstborn son on Christmas Eve by borrowing a commando's laptop and grabbing the satellite link from Afghanistan to visit the hospital website. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there," he told the image on the screen softly, over and over. It's one thing to calculate what we've lost; but then there's Victim Compensation Fund arbiter Ken Feinberg, advising a widower who wants to know whether he should fill out one claim form or two, since his wife was eight months pregnant. Most kids had their shock and confusion, but unlike Hilary Strauch, they didn't have a teacher pull them aside in the hall and say, "You're my hero," for how she has handled having her father crushed on TV.

TIME has tracked 11 people, 11 lives, men and women and children who are trailblazers in a new century, a new world, and they had no choice in the matter. A President elected in times of Peace and Prosperity finds he has to preside over War and Retrenchment. A military designed to sweep a continent is hunting shadows in caves. A progressive Pakistani girl sees her classmates reach for a burqa and wonders about progress and peace. We may dread the anniversary because we don't want to go back there, but these people have never really left. Sept. 11 might as well have been yesterday. So what do we owe them—and what can we learn from them?

On Sept. 10, we were living in a country with 19 terrorists poised to kill as many of us as possible, but we thought we were safe. From the next day forward, we thought otherwise. We bought gas masks and burned our mail, and flight attendants called in bomb threats to their airlines because they were scared to fly. People in Spencer, Iowa, began locking their doors, taking their keys out of their cars. Wal-Mart, which can race blankets, batteries and bottled water to any region hit by a hurricane or fire, ran out of the one thing everyone suddenly needed: a flag. Soon it was selling Little Patriots diapers. Spangle your baby's fanny with stars.

But at some point it was time to get on a subway or a plane. And that first ride, that first flight, was the first step back to Now. The blood banks had so much blood in the fall, they were throwing it out, but by Christmas some were putting out emergency calls because donations were lower than a year before. There was no baby boom nine months later. The markets survived the attacks, but not the crooks. The diabetics who craved the comfort of sundaes have gone back to watching their diets. The survivors are bickering over the payouts. The city is arguing over memorials. The doors are unlocked again in Spencer, but "nothing is ever going to be the same," says a local car dealer. Have we changed? Or just moved on?

The debate now has a natural geography. Washington is on a war footing, unless you call machine-gun squads near the Mall normal. Lower Manhattan has become hallowed ground, like Omaha Beach or Gettysburg. But elsewhere most people say the fear has largely passed or congealed into superstitions. A Chicago mom still won't take her kids to visit Dad in his Sears Tower office. People stay awake when they fly. Some Florida school districts have lifted the ban on cell phones, under pressure from parents who want to be able to reach their kids at any time. We have banned coolers from stadiums. Look around any city when a plane flies low, and you can see people pivot to the landmarks. The Empire State, the Golden Gate—is it still there?

The Washington Post reports that government experts know that lots of lives might be saved in the next terrorist attack if people had certain basic information: how to seal a room with duct tape or avoid radiation from a dirty bomb. But they don't trust people with the information, the paper quotes an official as saying, because "we're not in the business of terrifying the public." So members of Congress have evacuation routes, but the general population does not, despite the fact that a year ago the premise that people panic in a crisis was put to the ultimate test, and people passed, with honors. The states, soaked in red ink, can't do much without Washington's help. Texas put its land commissioner in charge of state security and gave him $50,000 to do the job. Last month President Bush decided not to release $5.1 billion for homeland security to show he's serious about controlling the budget.

There are the pragmatic reactions of a deeply pragmatic people determined to change as little as possible because we are so invested in our way of life. In Washington the government is installing 200 cameras around the city to safeguard the monuments to people who safeguarded our freedom. The D.C. hazardous-materials team, which used to be a part-time unit, now has more money than it knows what to do with. The fire chiefs have stormed the attics of the capital's municipal firehouses, dug the cold war-era Geiger counters out of their green canvas bags—some still bearing the old Civil Defense logo—and shipped them off to New Jersey for recalibration. Some of the counters' handbooks are dated 1963. All that's missing is a solemn voice intoning, "Everyone, remain calm."