After 9: Life During Wartime

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better. We certainly know what it feels like to watch them explode: this week two years ago we lost for good the sunny sense that our world was safe, that the oceans would protect us, that there were rules even among the hateful against mass slaughter of the innocent. Now a different set of illusions flakes--off about the costs of winning wars and making peace. By the time President Bush asks Congress for more money and the U.N. for more of everything--more peacekeepers and mine clearers and border guards--any illusion that America could spray peace and democracy throughout the Middle East and then quickly fly home will have vanished as well. Even those who opposed taking the battle to Iraq now have to accept that there is no turning back, and those who advanced the battle are forced to admit that true victory will take more time, cost more lives and consume more treasure than they had ever reckoned. Two years on, the global war on terrorism is more global and in some ways more terrifying because the stakes and the cost and the waiting only grow with each passing day.

This year when Americans think about Sept. 11, they don't look back so much as forward. There will be moments of silence and service motorcycle-rally fund raisers in Minnesota, interfaith prayer services in Cleveland, Ohio; panel discussions in Louisville, Ky.; blood drives in Indianapolis, Ind. But there are no network-TV marathons this time, and many victims' families are grateful to be left alone. The event felt enormous at the time, literally unimaginable. But our imaginations have become deeper, perhaps darker, colored by each new terrorism alert and stretched to allow for reasonable people to spend a week last winter buying plastic sheeting and gas masks. New York City turned a summer blackout into a carnival just because our worst fears were not realized: we briefly glimpsed a horror and then danced when we learned it was just an inconvenience.

It has been quiet at home this season, the terrorism alert dozing at code yellow, telling people to be aware but not afraid. You can live on the edge only for so long before you drink the bottled water and use the duct tape for packages and just hope for the best. A CNN/TIME poll last week found people worrying more about the economy than terrorism. Yet more than half of all Americans think things are not back to normal and never will be. It has become easy to wonder whether the President has done too little to protect the country or too much. On the one hand, his Attorney General is making speeches in 16 states to defend the Patriot Act because Congress is trying to repeal it, and more than 150 cities and towns have passed resolutions saying they don't like being spied on. On the other hand, you can read the latest reports about flimsy border security and lethal germs and how easily a man took a 4-in. knife on board a United flight in June and wish that even more money, more muscle, more ingenuity were going into this fight.