By FRANK RICH

Being human, you first think of those you love. Then, if you are
lucky enough to find them safe, you grieve for those who are lost
-- their faces still smiling out expectantly from downtown's
new quilt of mass death, the vast patchwork of fliers headlined
MISSING.

 Then you grieve for the city whose once indelible profile was
mutilated, just like that, on one beautiful September morning.

 After that you think of your country, and another kind of shock
sets in. Something has been lost there too, but not all of what's
gone may be a cause for mourning.

 We live in a different America today than we did only the day
before Tuesday. Yes, as it's incanted hourly, we have lost our
untroubled freedom of movement that we consider a birthright. We
have lost our illusion of impregnability. But beneath those
visceral imperatives an entire culture has been transformed. This
week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous
if not decadent decadelong dream, even as it dumps us into an
uncertain future we had never bargained for.

 The dream was simple -- that we could have it all without
having to pay any price, and that national suffering of almost any
kind could be domesticated into an experience of virtual terror
akin to a theme park ride. The first part of that dream had already
started to collapse with the fall of the stock market, the rise in
unemployment and the evaporation of the surplus, well before
terrorists achieved the literal annihilation of the most commanding
edifice of American capitalism.

 But the dream's second part was still going strong right until
Tuesday. The previously planned cover that People magazine scrapped
that afternoon to make way for the thousands dead was yet another
story about shark attacks. Never mind that the rate of shark
attacks has been routine this year, and that sharks are a
statistically minuscule cause of mortality at any time. (There have
been at most two deaths in any year since 1990.) The great shark
scare of 2001 -- already speeding to the dustbin of history,
along with such other summer ephemera as Gary Condit, Robert Blake
and Lizzie Grubman -- was typical of an age in which we
inflated troublesome but passing crises into catastrophes that
provided the illusion of a national test of character, or some kind
of moral equivalent of war, but in fact were for most of us merely
invitations to indulge in cost-free hyperventilation.

 From the rampaging fears over school shootings following Columbine
(at a time when U.S. juvenile homicide rates were falling to a 33-
year low) to the protracted bellicosity surrounding Eliàn
Gonzàlez to the California blackout that didn't happen at the
start of this summer, we've been looking for a Pearl Harbor. But
always a Pearl Harbor of few casualties -- always a Pearl
Harbor that could readily be brought to "closure."

 In our pop culture, this same impulse for vicarious, finite
warfare could be seen in the rise of TV reality programs like
"Survivor," "Fear Factor" and "Lost" in which we thrill to the
spectacle of contestants competing in war games -- always with
the understanding that no one is really going to get hurt in a
prime- time slice of "reality" that must move the sponsors'
products. On the day before Tuesday, after all, "survival," "fear"
and "lost" had different meanings than they did the day after.

 Our desire for vicarious battle, the one commodity a stock market
bubble couldn't buy, also explains the fetishization of World War
II. This week everyone has been comparing Tuesday's events to Pearl
Harbor, but only two months ago Pearl Harbor had been sanitized as
"Pearl Harbor." In that Hollywood version of the attack, seen by
countless teenagers who may now have to fight an actual war, the
enemy seems polite, the violence looks like the digitalized carnage
of video games, and a harrowing American defeat gets an upbeat
"victory" coda that minimizes and vastly shortens the ensuing years
of hardship, loss and heroism that were required for the Allies to
win a war.

  At the high end of what I suspect is the now- defunct World War II
craze is HBO's brand new series, "Band of Brothers," whose
relentlessly publicized premiere preceded this week's tragedy.
"There was a time when the world asked ordinary men to do
extraordinary things," went the ad copy, which took pains to remind
us that the miniseries was "based on the true story." In a way, the
pitch enshrines the complacency of the day before Tuesday, with its
assumption that the prospect of civilians having to make any kind
of extraordinary effort for a national good was as far in the past
as the knights of the Round Table.

 That fat, daydreaming America is gone now, way gone -- as
spent as the tax-rebate checks, as forgotten as the 2000 campaign's
debate over prescription-drug plans, as bankrupt as our dot-com
fantasies of instant millions, as vaporized as the faith that
high-tech surveillance and weaponry would keep us safe. The America
that saw Disney's "Pearl Harbor" is as far removed from the America
that was attacked on Tuesday as the America that listened to Orson
Welles's "War of the Worlds" was from the America attacked at Pearl
Harbor. "Instead of the next big thing being some new technological
innovation or medical breakthrough," wrote David Rieff of our
post-Tuesday nation in The Los Angeles Times this week, "the next
big thing is likely to be fear."

 For the America that is gone, the America that could have it all
and feel no pain beyond that on cable TV, George W. Bush was the
perfect president. We could have a big tax cut (or at least some of
us could) along with increases in spending for better schools and
defense -- and all without having to dip into the Social
Security stash. We could lick our energy crisis -- does anyone
still remember the energy crisis? -- while still guzzling gas.
Faith-based institutions would take care of the poor and
unfortunate. No serviceman would have to spend any more time in
harm's way than Mr. Bush (or most political leaders of his
generation, regardless of party) did during Vietnam.

 Since Tuesday, there has been a towering leader in view --
Rudolph Giuliani -- and, in a lucid and rational Colin Powell,
potentially another. The big-three network anchors have upheld
pre-Drudge journalistic standards, offering reportage rather than
blather and rumor, doing their part to steady a country that still
gathers at the tube, not the computer screen, at a time like this.
In all this we've been blessed, for there were 48 hours during
which the president was scarcely visible or articulate.

 The country is rooting for Mr. Bush, as it must. We need him to
become the president of the America we have now. This means in part
a U- turn in style -- more face time with his fellow citizens,
less scripted rhetoric from the alliterative phrasemakers who stick
pretty words in his mouth (as they did Tuesday night) that sound as
if they were written by the same glib stylists who gave him "home
to the heartland" and "communities of character."

 But style is the easy part. What's more pressing are changes in
content. Many of his administration's previous policies are either
irrelevant or contrary to a war-bound nation's interests. Education
and tax cuts are no longer our top priority. The unilateralism the
administration has practiced in walking away from the Kyoto accord
on global warming and the ABM treaty is anathema to the building of
an international coalition to fight a war. Decisions that are "the
most profound of our time" (as his handlers described his stem-cell
verdict) can no longer be dragged out with weeks of
self-aggrandizing spin.

 But most of all, Mr. Bush will have to prepare the nation for
something many living Americans, him included, have never had to
muster -- sacrifice. In his pronouncements thus far, the
president has expressed sorrow and vowed to "whip" evil, but surely
he will soon have to prepare Americans to give up far more in
wartime than curbside check-in at the airport. Anyone who lives in
New York has seen this week how many Americans are prepared to do
this. That's the example our mayor and governor set, and it's the
example thousands of New Yorkers have followed with open hearts.

 Though polls show that we overwhelmingly support the idea of going
to war, they don't indicate whether we understand that idea. The
killers who attacked us on Tuesday had an all too ruthless eye for
appraising how little we knew on Monday. We have no choice now but,
as a horror- struck Hamlet said after being visited by the ghost,
to "wipe away all trivial fond records" from the table of memory,
and hope that our learning curve will be steep.