The term taken for granted, which often has a negative connotation, is not negative in itself. We need to have elements of our life that we can take for granted in order to make our way in the world. Taken for granted, if we look at its full meaning, is often positive and beneficial. Think of the countless little decisions and choices we make each day, the numerous actions we perform to get through 24 hours. Just to get ready for work, we need to choose to get out of bed when the alarm clock rings, choose to brush our teeth, choose to take a shower, decide whether to eat breakfast, to take the car or the bus to work. After making choices, we still have to act on them, usually in a particular, habitual way. We make the bed after we get up; brush the top left molars first, then move left to right and top to bottom; wash and condition our hair, then wash body parts from face to foot, eat pancakes rather than oatmeal or granola. So even before we actually “start” our day, we have made decisions and engaged in different tasks, a list that does not include getting dressed for work and all the decisions that the routine entails, depending on what lies ahead during the day.

We make all these decisions and engage in these actions mostly without thinking about them. We surely do not ponder their basic raison d'être—why we have to make them at a given time or why we have to make them at all. They are a basic part of our lives, unmarked because they are taken for granted and unexamined. They are invisible, hidden, unnoticed as we go on with our daily lives. We count on them as parts of our everyday existence until something goes wrong. Occasionally, we will slip up and forget an element in this daily path—forget our wallet, misplace our car keys, leave our briefcase behind, wonder whether we remembered to lock the front door. When we overlook an element in this rote list, things do not work as well as we are used to, and we feel “out of sorts.” This is, in part, because these unmarked elements that can throw us so easily out of whack are not elements of our lives that we pay attention to. We pay more attention to office politics or celebrity scandals in the morning news than to our daily basics. We think of our lives as made up of more than the routines we must go through and feel that we “do not have a life” when our lives become too routine.

Yet, our routine activities and day-in, day-out decisions, our way of doing things and relating to others do not merely take up most of our time. In large measure, they define who we are and provide the glue that connects us to the rest of society. Cumulatively over time, they constitute our identity as others know us and as we become who we are. They are intrinsic to our sense of identity and a part of feeling good about our daily lives. Upset the mundane, with its sense of comfort, and we are upset as individuals. We become uneasy, candidates for panaceas of all kinds—in work, drink, drugs, exercise, medication, tranquilizers. Before searching for remedies, it makes sense to look at what we need—predictability, trust, and a sense of security—human necessities that terrorist attacks like those of 9-11 set out to destroy.

In order for everyday choices and actions to become a comfortable routine, we must be able to predict what will happen. We have to know—knowledge gained from experience—that if we do X, then Y and Z will happen. If we are going to work, then we must go through all the preparations to get ready and to leave prepared, both physically and psychologically. We can predict the everyday things we are going to do because we have made them routine, and they end up “routine” because they are predictable.

It is no different with other aspects of our daily lives. When we walk past someone on the street, we have different options: say hello and smile, drop our eyes and avoid any kind of contact, or cross the street in an effort to ensure our personal security. City dwellers enter what the philosopher/sociologist Georg Simmel called the blasé response: We acknowledge the person in some small way and move on, hardly recognizing or briefly acknowledging their existence, taking little or no notice of how they present themselves, regardless of how bizarre. We have a kind of performance routine available to us, in which we say our lines and move on to “the next scene” (work, shopping, a bar or restaurant, our next passing interaction). We know that the response of the “other” is going to parallel ours, and we move on to the next encounter. The entire situation is predictable because we have learned from social conditioning (experience) how things are supposed to happen.

This predictability is a necessary and reassuring component of our daily lives. We have to know what the weather is going to be like, when traffic will be heaviest and how long it takes to get somewhere, what lies ahead at work, what to do when interacting with other people in various situations. Social interaction depends on predictability in both directions, on how we act and how others interact with us. Laws, social norms, and customs, whether written or not, all drive predictability, which is why so much of our socialization as children is devoted to interactional routines—saying “please” and “thank you,” “hello” and “goodbye” in appropriate ways.

We depend on these aspects of social life for managing the seemingly endless set of interactions we have with other people on a daily basis. When we feel things are unpredictable—for example, when we move across town or across the world—we do not feel a part of a place. We do not feel “at home,” the desired feeling in our lives. Nothing brings this home like being a tourist or recognizing others as tourists. People who are “tourists” do not act quite correctly, drive, or conduct themselves according to local custom. They do not “fit in,” and we are not automatically able to predict what they will do.

The ability to predict what others will do has a reciprocal impact. If we cannot predict what others will do, we are not sure what to do ourselves. The unpredictability also confronts the other person, who cannot predict what we are going to do. For the sake of avoiding unpredictability and ensuring the smooth flow of people's actions or interactions, societies develop set routines that strongly govern these actions and interactions, routines we learn by virtue of living somewhere and experiencing how things are done. These routines, these predictable ways of acting, are fundamental to the establishment of a culture and a society. Though they may differ from society to society, they are essential and help to make social life routine, making it possible for us to go through our day without having to think about every little action or interaction.

The predictability of our social and daily lives requires and engenders a sense of trust in those around us and in our surroundings. That we can roughly predict how people are going to act toward and interact with us enables us to trust a given situation, freeing us from second-guessing the response or ourselves. We can, at least tacitly, trust that a stranger to whom we nod hello on the street will not turn on us, but rather that he or she will reciprocate our noncommittal greeting. In other words, there is a kind of mutual and implicit trust between people, even strangers, that each will act in accordance with the expectations of our culture and with the other's expectations.

At the same time, the predictability of daily and social life also requires that we can rely on ourselves and our personal infrastructure to function as expected and needed— from our bodies to our cars, from the home heating system to the telephone, from the electricity to the running water, from police and fire services to emergency ambulance services. We expect the family car to start because we trust its manufacturer, we trust in our keeping up with the maintenance schedule, and we trust the mechanics who have worked on it. When we cross the street, we trust that drivers will stop for red lights and turn in the direction of their signals. Whatever we do during the day, we take it for granted that others will follow the “rules of the road.”

We take everyday things for granted in this chain of dependence that makes daily life possible, trusting all the public and private services, all the people staffing them, and all the people that we run up against: pedestrians, shoppers, drivers, restaurant workers, and servers. This trust is an essential part of managing our daily lives.

On reflection, the mutually reinforcing combination of predictability and trust serves as the fabric of social life. The acts that we perform, the choices we make, the interactions we have, and all the other stuff of mundane life rely on our ability to predict what others can and will do. This, in turn, governs our response based on our ability to trust others by knowing how they will act and how things will function.

Taken together as the “social contract”—the implicit contract between people that they will follow the rules—predictability and trust give us a third fundamental of everyday life: a sense of security. While security comes to mind as something that is explicitly pursued—buying a home alarm or a car theft-prevention device—it is more fundamental and more organic. If we close our eyes and think of the place where we feel most safe, it is most likely our home. That sense of being at home is crucial to the normal functioning of our ordinary lives.

Being at home really means being a part of something larger than us—a family, a community, a city—and not having to think about or intentionally act to bring about that feeling. The Norman Rockwell version of “home”—part of what has been called the “nostalgia trap” of American society—is supposed to happen naturally, not require conscious effort. It happens that way in sitcoms, in stories parents tell their children about “how things used to be” when they were young. “At-homeness” is just there, and we need it in order to glide smoothly and effortlessly through the many actions we embark on every day, at home, at work, in school and stores, on local streets and national highways, at the movies, and in front of the TV. Even when we are away from home, whether on vacation or on business, we tend to stick to routines we develop at home.

The basics of everyday life discussed here—trust, predictability, and security—enable us to feel confident that things will operate as they are supposed to while we also refer to larger perspectives and mindsets for a sense of at-homeness. These range from the proverbial “God, home, and country” to faith in a particular religion. Knowing that these frameworks continue to hold true allows us to predict how things work, to trust in their operation, and to feel at home in the world. This sense of at-homeness is crucially needed so that we can live extraordinary lives, adding meaning to everydayness.

Normally, this kind of discussion is relegated to university courses in sociology or articles in scholarly journals. But that was before 9-11. The all-inclusive war on terrorism has brought the issue out of the theoretical realm and into the practical. The effects appear in our daily lives. The real targets are us—or rather, our sense of the everydayness of the world around us—as we go about our daily lives, begin yet another workday, take the train, make a plane reservation, go to the office. The attacks of 9-11 made us all vulnerable, struck at the fabric of everyday American life, left us feeling violated, outraged, victimized, and ultimately fearful and uncertain about the future.

Our trust in “Fortress America” has been shaken. In the decades since the end of World War II, if not since the end of the Soviet nuclear threat and the Cold War in 1991, Americans viewed their country as basically impregnable to outside attack, unlike beleaguered nations all over the world. Of course, this was not entirely true. There have been terrorist attacks. The World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1994 certainly were attacks in America, but they were not explicitly attacks on America, on what America stands for and on what America has done in the world. September 11 was. The attacks on the most obvious signs of American power—economic power in the form of the World Trade Center and military power in the form of the Pentagon—exposed Fortress America as vulnerable. We could no longer take it for granted as impregnable. We could be violated. If 9-11 could happen, what else could happen?

As security becomes a national preoccupation, the issue dominates reporting, public discussion, and commentary in the media, which then intensifies public attention and escalates individual concerns. Just as events during the Cold War were typically examined as pro- or anti-Communist, so after 9-11 any bombings, air crashes, or possible signs of terrorism are examined in terms of “terrorist conspiracies.” Anxiety is magnified by ballyhooed actions to strengthen security, by any signs of security breakdowns, and by the entire process of building up “homeland security.” Suddenly, Americans are confronting changes in everyday life, as reinforced by government warnings of terrorist threats and dramatized by highly visible security in public places. Legislation made possible the surveillance of individuals perceived as a threat to “national security,” and military tribunals provided a forum where national security could be protected via the secrecy of trials. The United States became security-minded, with its citizens expected to do their part.

As individuals and as communities, we felt as though everything in our lives that had been unmarked before September 11 was now marked, up for questioning, review, and possibly suspicion after September 11. Everything predictable, everything that made us feel at home in our daily lives as citizens of obstensibly the most powerful and secure nation in the world, was no longer predictable, no longer matter of fact. As a country, we had to rethink business as usual, pay attention to security, and figure out the difference between real and imagined danger. College students in class began sitting close to the exits; people began looking up apprehensively at the sky when they heard a plane; and, after the anthrax letter attacks, even that most mundane of daily items, the mail, landed at our front door with the menacing sound of a threat.

The change highlights the difference between feeling at home and feeling secure. The latter is a tactical state of mind—being on guard, maintaining awareness, and anticipating the breakdown of things around us. It signifies a fear of things outside our control. The former carries with it a sense of happiness or contentedness, where we feel safe, not because we are hunkered down against any potential threat but because we are cared for and loved by others and feel connected to them. After 9-11, the feeling of at-homeness gave way to the pursuit of security which, on reflection, had been going on for decades. Master-planned and gated communities and apartment complexes were built in response to the 1960s “white flight” following inner-city riots. They provide easily masked security measures such as roadway layouts that get outsiders lost and front doors that never face the street. In shifting from a rehabilitation model to a “quarantine” model, the criminal justice and mental health systems warehouse criminals and mentally disabled people far away from “society” for as long as possible. Security guards, video surveillance, and Internet-based surveillance protocols such as Echelon have become commonplace. In sum, Americans have felt for years that the world is threatening. When we trade making the world a place to be at home for the security of a bunker, the world “falls apart” even more.

A bunker mentality and quest for security pervasively affect how we act in public. We watch out for people who might be a “threat,” whether a “city cat” in a small town or someone we have been told might be a threat. We cover our PIN numbers at bank machines and pay phones, guard our credit card numbers by shredding receipts and statements, and shop online only with companies that have secure servers and explicit security policies. We have been on a quest for security for years now; September 11 has accelerated that quest.

The war on terrorism and repeated alerts keep the issue of security in the foreground of our consciousness through a continuous barrage by newspaper, magazine, radio, and TV, thereby reinforcing a sense of insecurity. Creation of the cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security established the pursuit of security as a federal priority and reinforced the feeling that we cannot take security for granted. Uneasiness is an inevitable by-product. If the combined resources of the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence agencies of allied countries could not warn us of 9-11, it is natural to worry about predicting future attacks.

Finding it difficult to assuage the sense of insecurity, politicians find themselves having to speak to both aspects of how we live our lives, to both (in)security and the quest for at-homeness. In the interest of public knowledge, they have to inform the American public of potential or possible threats; they also have to say, “Don't worry, it'll be alright, go back to living your lives as you did before.” This tension between protecting against threats and making the world a place to be at home in plagues us all, making it difficult to recreate a sense of normalcy and ordinariness. September 11 showed us that some events, regardless of how much we believe we are insulated from them or how far-fetched they might sound, can happen to any of us anywhere, anytime. We are not only in a world where predictability, trust, and security are in question. We are in a world where unpredictability, suspicion, and insecurity have become new watchwords and represent new challenges for the 21st century.

As 9-11 showed, unpredictability is a key element in terrorist strategy. Terrorists want to make sure that no one knows what is coming. This multiplies exponentially the impact of their attacks. There are few, if any, secrets about the array of tools of terror—various kinds of bombs and biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. What we do not know, but need to know, is where, when, and how—uncertainties that have a pervasive impact on our daily lives. This unpredictability is designed to keep us off-guard, living under a cloud of uncertainty.

Part of the logic behind establishing the Office for Homeland Security was to regain some element of predictability by coordinating intelligence findings in order to avert terrorist attacks and to make it possible for Americans to go back to some facsimile of pre-9-11 life. Meanwhile, the unpredictability of global affairs has been “brought home” to us, and it seeps into our everyday lives, in the way we feel about our surroundings, in our confidence in the infrastructure of services we rely on, and in deciding how to plan activities at work or leisure. Terrorism, as has become clear, is about the threat of attacks as much as about the actual attacks. It exacts multiple kinds of costs—economic, in the security measures that are taken; political, in the impacts of security measures on the basics of American civic life; and psychological, in the malaise we feel in not knowing what will happen or when. The terrorist threat and the consequent war on terrorism threaten and disrupt our everyday living.

Unpredictability affects our lives by forcing us to pay attention to actions we previously handled by rote. We can still feel fairly confident that strangers on the street will not turn on us. But will they go through the expected performance rituals? Do we look suspicious to them? Are there everyday things that we decide to change, such as not working or living in a towering building? Do we drive rather than fly on our next business or vacation trip? If we decide to fly, do we find ourselves eyeing fellow passengers with misgivings? Do we hold back talking to the passenger next to us? Or do we take pains to check them out? Do we stay on alert, instead of napping or reading a favorite mystery novel? In one situation after another, we are liable to find ourselves questioning the basic elements of everyday actions, in part because we have lost the ability to take them completely for granted.

The unpredictability that became more manifest after September 11 makes us pay more attention to the people we encounter and to our surroundings. What happens to our feelings about strangers when we read about terrorists who blended into our community and became invisible? What happens when we hear warnings that we must be suspicious of everything and everyone, ranging from our mail to “people who are not for us”? Just as unpredictability makes its way from the societal level into our daily lives, so does suspicion. The fact that the people who planned and executed the September 11 attacks lived among us and became part of our daily lives can prompt us to look at outsiders with suspicion. We find ourselves asking, What if?, a reaction fueled by dramatic media coverage of violence in unexpected places—a school, a post office, a factory. We expect our neighbors to be “like us” and treat our interactions with them as unmarked, until something goes horribly wrong. Then we tend toward a suspicious view of other people and become sensitive to “signs” that they might be a threat.

The 9-11 attacks opened the way to a level of suspicion characterized as “the fear of the other.” Whether characterized as racism, ethnocentrism, or failure to understand other cultures, the fact that the attackers were Muslims and of Arab descent directed suspicion toward that particular group. It becomes another chapter in the tendency to fear and/or resent immigrants, a reaction that crops up in all countries—America included. The 9-11 attacks transformed fear of others into incidents involving harassment of and attacks on people of the Muslim faith or of Arabic or Sikh descent (because they all wear turbans, as one distorted rationale stated.). As terror-induced suspicion spilled over into suspicion of people who differed from mainstream Americans in their faith or ethnicity, the spillover was felt even by those who disagreed with U.S. foreign policy. If Americans were to fear that acting on two of the fundamental elements of American civic life—acceptance of immigrants and freedom of speech—would subject them to suspicion, this would represent another victory for 9-11 terrorists. We must be careful of viewing those who are different, either by background or by opinion, as suspect and in the extreme as siding with terrorists. The politics of suspicion is a difficult fight, resulting in people turning on one another. This is precisely what terrorism as a tactic is about: destroying the fabric of a society by getting the members of that society to tear it apart for them.

The combination of unpredictability and suspicion creates another feeling—insecurity. What we confronted after 9-11 is the reality that everyday life in America did not operate in the way we thought it did. We were not really secure and living in predictable times. We found out that the security we assumed we had was not there. Insecurity came to the fore. When that happens, it is both natural and understandable to try to do something about it—to try to pursue real security.

So how do we reclaim that sense of being at home in a world where airplanes can become bombs, where U.S. troops wander through the desert looking for professional soldiers and terrorists who look like anonymous civilians, and where we no longer know whom to trust, whether it is our neighbor or our supposed political ally?

What we need, then, is to work on coming to terms with and creating a new at homeness in this new world social order, where unpredictability and suspicion reign. This social order is not one that can be controlled by one government or leader. Events in this new version of our world are only sporadically within anyone's clear control, and everyone must deal with the events, their causes, our responsibilities, and the ramifications of all these issues. This project is not something that the American government, no matter how hard it tries, can do for us on its own, nor is it a goal that we can achieve on our own. Instead, it is a symbiotic process that requires both the government and the American public to rethink how we live in the world. This is not to say that we need to explore such great ideological questions as, Is capitalism evil? or Is the U.S. an imperial power? Instead, we need to examine how we live our everyday lives. (The roles of government, politics, leadership, and foreign policy are discussed elsewhere in this book. Here, the discussion focuses on our experiences as individuals, “feeling our way.”)

By working to create a sense of being at home instead of working only to maintain our security, we can rebuild the trust that is necessary if we are going to restore everydayness in our daily lives. That is not only the trust we have in strangers not attacking us or in the support our loved ones provide. It also needs to be an effort to rebuild trust as both an individual and a collective effort. That trust needs to be made explicit; we need to be able to say to those around us, “I trust you to be my neighbors,” so that they can say the same to us. Think of how we talk about former friends or lovers, strangers, people who are different from us, or even the government and watch for the lack of trust that comes up in that discourse. Clearly, the creation of an explicitly given trust is necessary in the coming months and years. Trust brings predictability. Once we know for sure that we can trust others, we can predict what they will do and how they will conduct themselves. And this predictability reinforces the trust we place in others, which is what we need in order to feel secure—or rather, at home—in the world.

The difficulty, though, is that even before September 11, trust began disappearing from our world. As many social commentators, including Robert Putnam, have noted, there has been a breakdown over the past 50 years in our “civil society,” the sphere of voluntary associations, informal interactions, and private circles of friends. Putnam's idea of “bowling alone”—pursuing activities individually that we used to do collectively—captures this sense perfectly. We no longer feel a part of our communities, our cities, or our nations, except in extreme circumstances. Even before 9-11, it had become clear that we needed to rebuild our trust in others and our sense of being at home in the world around us. September 11 has just made that clearer and showed us that the lack of community feeling does not simply stop at the borders of our neighborhood. It transcends the borders of our nation.

How do we embark on this project? How can we work to remake our world so we can feel at home, trust in others, have that trust reciprocated, and reclaim the kind of predictability that makes it possible to live a safe and secure life? As already indicated, it is a symbiotic process, one that requires both our involvement and that of our government. While that might seem to be an impossible task, given the position our government finds itself in, we can engage in the process with personal involvement that, in and of itself, will add to our own sense of security.

We can begin by making it clear to elected officials that politics of suspicion and insecurity are unacceptable to us, thereby making them unpalatable to elected officials. Democracy or not, our government primarily relies on one thing for determining its political agenda: opinion polls. If the American people make it clear that these kinds of politics are not acceptable, such politics can change, apocalyptic rhetoric cease, and new ways of thinking about America's relationship with the world appear. We may be part of the war on terrorism, but it has not been a long-standing war, though critics argue that it could very well last indefinitely, giving rise to continued politics of suspicion and insecurity. So why not bring about a “war on suspicion,” one that could allay the conditions that stand in the way of living comfortably at home with others?

In our own lives, we need to find ways to rethink how we live near and with others. Are we maintaining a bunker mentality or are we actually getting to know others? Are we clinging to a Cold War mantra, “America—love it or leave it”? Or are we discussing with others across political, social, economic, and cultural/ethnic boundaries how we can individually and collectively bring about a new America? Is our reaction to September 11 and those who perpetrated it being generalized to everyone with similar ethnic and religious backgrounds? Are we able to separate the criminals from “the others”? It is not terrorists who might destroy the American way; it is we as Americans who will make or break the American way of life in the 21st century. It is up to us in the way we respond to the attacks of 9-11, in the way we define ourselves, in the ways in which we think about ourselves as individual Americans dealing positively with the human condition, and in the choices we make about how we will live with others in the world, both near and afar.