Once your aliveness hit you, once you were certain that America was still standing, wasn't it amazing how precious your complaint-filled life suddenly seemed?

Tragedy shows us a world unobscured by pettiness and ego. Our vision narrows to what matters.

And it ain't who Julia Roberts is dating.

Inevitably, we're shifting back. We're cutting each other off in traffic again. Questioning each other's motives. Feeling simple dread replace the sense of every pore being flung open to fear.

We're losing the clarity that briefly buffed the world, that made us appreciate, as seldom before, our families and our nation.

But when fanatics attacked, which America did we see threatened? Did we fear for the nation as it is, or for one that we only dream exists?

When our focus shifted from killer sharks to killer regimes, we were right to be appalled by the Taliban, a government under which having a too-short beard or a TV set is a crime, under which men have few rights and women -- swathed head to toe in fabric and fear -- have none.

We were right to thank God we're free. Not just to look critically at our enemies but to examine what our wonderful freedom has wrought.

Turn on the TV. Click past documentaries and news and cable's cornucopia of everything from antiques to zebras.

How often do you see the America you prayed for on Sept. 11?

Here's what I see: Cable programs aimed at teenagers featuring young people having every imaginable type of sex -- except the loving, committed kind. Countless videos with cameras zoomed tight on barely covered breasts and vibrating rumps. Talk shows featuring women pregnant with their third fatherless child cussing their unfaithful lovers.

On networks, I see smut produced by business-suited men and women who know better but who gladly give the public "what it wants."

I hear the creator of NBC's "The West Wing" exhorting major network executives to allow their programming to adopt cable's hair-singeing profanity. Urging "realism."

You want realism? Visit a high school. You'll find kids working to learn -- and enough alienation, apathy and drugs to break your heart and make my now-departed Costa Rican exchange student ask, "Why do so many American kids use and sell drugs?"

Visit a suburban grade school where 8-year-olds write graphic stories about stabbings and beheadings. Or a middle school where counselors tell seventh-grade girls why oral sex isn't "safe."

For anti-realism, watch Hollywood postpone the release of films featuring terrorism and mass murder -- as if such fare doesn't fill multiple shelves at video stores and appear hourly on TV. Or rent Schwarzenegger's "True Lies" and enjoy its 88 separate killings tonight.

Since we're in full patriotic flower, let's ask what our founders would think of American culture.

Would their assessment differ much from that of peace-loving Muslims and homegrown Americans of every faith and non-faith -- appalled by the degradation that depletes our children, and that we're gleefully spreading worldwide?

Let's not forget the God whose blessings we entreat in suddenly crowded churches. How must He see us?

As beautiful, I hope. Because America is beautiful. For its potential. For spacious skies under which every manner of human lives, argues, loves. For amber waves as luminous as its people's openness. But to pretend that beautiful is all that we are slams the door on a dangerous truth:

Recent events aside, America's public face has gotten considerably uglier.

Singing anthems isn't as important as living them. Before our vision clouds, let's see what we've become. Let's use the precious national discourse that allows us to criticize our government and each other -- a right that terrifies our foes -- to create a more loving, life-affirming culture.

If 9-11 was a wake-up call, we can choose its lessons. Because we share the world rather than own it, we can learn more about our international neighbors. We can ask whether our appetites for oil and quick fixes serve the greater good. We can address the fact that our government's actions in the Middle East -- and Africa and elsewhere -- aren't always fair.

Killing a fanatic like Osama bin Laden won't cure millions of non-murdering people's concerns about us.

A nation is like a family. Those who truly love their children, spouses and siblings challenge them to be better.

That September morning's unimaginable ugliness awakened in us a courage, generosity and beauty of spirit we might never have known we possessed. Our thoughts, suddenly naked and simple, narrowed to those whom we love, and those cruelly snatched away.

Whatever the terrorists' mission, ours should be more than just crushing them. It should be making our reality as a nation rise to our dream of what we could become.

Then Osama and his minions will truly have failed.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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