That's a little harder to do when the headlines report that the FBI's computers still can't talk to one another, its top managers are fleeing the force, the Customs Service can't find more than a thousand credentials that let people into the most sensitive areas of airports and harbors, and the Justice Department has lost 775 weapons and 400 laptops over the past three years. Al-Qaeda appears to be alive and well, or at least well funded. Pilots keep pushing for guns because, they say, the plan to put air marshals in planes turned out to be a joke. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission still doesn't know how many foreign nationals work at nuclear plants; the reactor sites fail security checks about half the time. But talk to a customs inspector, and you'll understand that stopping every truck in search of spores and dirty bombs would mean 16-hour delays and halted assembly lines at auto plants throughout the hemisphere. Whose scales shall we use to balance security and prosperity and freedom?

The notion of recruiting the UPS driver into a domestic spy service was widely ridiculed, but people argue freely that we are all spies now, unrepentant racial profilers. "Driving down the highway, I'll look at people in cars and decide if they're people I should try and get away from," says a Chicago businessman. If a car's occupants "look like terrorists, I'm going to try and not drive too close to that car. It might explode." Some Muslim Americans say they can't imagine normal anymore. A Muslim woman in Florida who wears a hijab, or traditional head scarf, says she is afraid to stand at a bus stop for fear of a car swerving to hit her. Some men named Mohammed have changed their name to Michael.

The books and seminars on Islam are booming, but does greater knowledge of other faiths lead to understanding or alarm? "I've been this big pluralism person. I've studied Islam, been to mosques, done ecumenical stuff," says Mary Nilsen, an Iowa writing instructor, "[but] Muslim fundamentalism really scares the hell out of me. A lot of people have become more educated about Islam, more tolerant and open. I think I've just edged the other way, and I'm not very proud of that." West Point has reinstituted its language requirement, trimmed back in 1989, as well as culture classes and added a new terrorism course. At Emory University twice as many students have signed up for Arabic courses as last year. There has been a 50% increase in enrollment for religious studies at Georgia State since last summer. But over at the business school, the hot class is corporate risk management.

Is the young generation really transformed? A New York City student tells his parents, "Yeah, I know, I'm lucky to be alive. I just don't want to hear it anymore." A survey by the Horatio Alger Association found that two-thirds of teenagers believe that Sept. 11 was the most significant event of their lifetime. Parents say it is their kids' Watergate and Vietnam rolled together and see a blessing and a curse. "Best-case scenario?" asks a white mom of an adopted black son, 9. "His generation pays attention to world politics and doesn't ignore—as I feel I have—foreign policy, with the idea that it can't affect us. Worst-case scenario? They're fearful of people who look different from them, different cultures, different religions. We're working harder now at making that not happen."

Parents like the fact that their kids finally have real role models, not radioactive rock stars and bionic athletes. Being a cop or a fire fighter is now less a trade than a calling. Leaving Shea Stadium after a New York Mets game one summer afternoon, an 8-year-old boy with a baseball glove approaches the cops directing traffic and asks one to sign it. "Don't you want a ballplayer's autograph? Why a cop's?" the officer asks. The boy responds, "Because you helped save the world."

President Bush tried to find an escape hatch from the corporate scandals that stalked him this summer in the spirit of higher callings and new priorities. He addressed the attack of the robber barons by saying, "You know, the bottom line and this corporate-America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbor, loving your neighbor like you'd like to be loved yourself?" But people who do not live in New York and Washington have been hit more directly by the attacks on the markets than by the attacks of last fall. Enron's collapse turned its hometown of Houston inside out. "That affects a lot more people's lives on a day-to-day basis," says resident George Nelson. "If you are afraid that you might be unemployed, you are not thinking about 9/11." More people said they thought the country was on the right track in October—amid daily alerts and anthrax fears and fire fights in Afghanistan—than in July.

It is harder for the President to argue that we are at war when so little is asked of anyone but the soldiers doing the fighting. "The fact that the country quickly returned to normal life is something I do not quite understand," says Duane Jackson, a retired Wisconsin businessman. "Perhaps because no one is having to make any direct sacrifices like we did in World War II. We fight a phantom war, against an unseen enemy, with no direct battle lines. Where is the war?" During the Civil War, he notes, more than "600,000 lives were lost, and yet we do not even have a special national holiday to remember any part of that great conflict. So my feelings on 9/11 remain complex and, in a strange way, uninvolved."

Because Sept. 11 is still one of a kind, people can make it what they want. The left says it has made us more aware of the need to be both humble and generous at home and abroad. The right is glad we now honor our soldiers and suspect our allies and can finally agree that some values are not just a matter of opinion. The faithful talk of a spiritual revival, even though the pollsters say that moment has passed; if we are on a spiritual journey, it does not necessarily pass through a sanctuary, and clerics from coast to coast must wonder whether they missed an opportunity they never expected to have, when they were flooded with people searching for answers but who, after waiting a few weeks, went looking elsewhere.

The only things scarier than the questions we can't answer are the answers we can't avoid. Somewhere in the back of our minds is the knowledge that stunned us that day—knowledge about how America is seen, about where democracies are vulnerable, about what we are capable of at our very best, what courage, what creativity, what kindness individually and collectively. That knowledge, now framed as memory, still poses a challenge. When we didn't know we had the strength, there was no shame in not using it. But now that we know what we can do, how do we excuse ourselves for falling back into the shallows? "In some pathetic way, I miss the realness of it all," says Nilsen, who still has an American flag propped up in a planter in her Des Moines kitchen: "People were real, and now we're back to all this petty politicking. Not that I want another bad thing to happen, but something in me misses the kind of country we were during those weeks."

The survivors and the soldiers on the front lines still live in that country. Most of us will just be visiting sometime in the next few weeks, dragged back by a thousand hours and pages of retrospective and elegy. We will be reminded of the destruction, relive the fury and fight again the battle between the change we value and the change we fear. We're not meant to have fixed everything by the big day; as with New Year's resolutions, anniversaries are a chance to take stock and keep working. And this first one is important because with each successive one, the memory may fade. Whatever other wars we fight together, this one we each get to fight alone, defending our habits and confidence and freedom against enemies who would destroy them and using as a weapon the skills we have built by doing so. We know more now. If only we can remember that we do.

—Reported by Michael Duffy/Washington, Harlene Ellin/Chicago, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Mitch Frank/New York and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines