Has American Life Really Changed Since Sept. 11?

My neighbor's son died on Christmas morning, 2001. He appeared out of nowhere one day last summer. Angry and sweating, he unloaded a yellow Ryder truck filled with all he had after a marriage of several years ended. In middle age, he was retreating to his childhood home.

We didn't get along at first. But as fall blended into winter, he would wander the neighborhood, often a little tipsy, looking for people to talk with. Eventually he started coming by with a gift of homegrown tomatoes. Every so often he'd ask me for advice about his divorce. I had to gently remind him that I knew nothing about family law.

One day I was working in the front yard and he mentioned something about his life. He had been a high-flying banking executive in Arizona during the 1980s' savings and loan boom. "I will never forget it," he told me. "Brokers would fly us everywhere. Everything was first class."

But then the bubble burst. He went through a succession of dead-end jobs. In the end, nothing seemed to fit.

He mentioned a letter he'd written that was published in the Saturday Los Angeles Times sports section. I said I'd seen it. I thought it was good.

"Did you?" he asked. "I really appreciate that."

They say he drank himself to death. "It was inevitable," said his father, a neighbor of many years, on Christmas day. His son's son, a teenager I'd never seen before, was quietly sobbing on the front lawn.

It will doubtless be said that 2001 was a year of clarity. Sept. 11 supposedly cut through the post-1990s cultural fog enveloping our country and illuminated more fundamental realities. We learned that monumental evil still threatens our lives. We found we could yet muster the will to fight it. A new maturity, perhaps, now tempers the giddy silliness of the late 1990s.

Those who feel a change point out that without the shock of the terror attacks, Gary Condit, not Rudolph Giuliani, might have been Time's person of the year. Some think we are fed fewer fluff headlines than last spring when "news" included stories about an Iranian who choked to death while licking honey from one of his bride's false fingernails and a Norwegian moose that tried to have sex with a Ford. And it may be that talk shows are now less likely to debate such issues as whether a male sperm donor should, as a Swedish judge ordered during 2001, be forced to pay child support after a lesbian couple who had "commissioned" the baby split up.

Yet, I wonder if beyond such trivia our confusion has really lifted all that much. After the World Trade Towers fell, for example, Kenneth Hearlson, a tenured professor in an obscure Orange County college, held a passionate class about the atrocities. Four Muslim students charged him with making racist remarks.

Hearlson, it turns out, is a Christian and a political conservative. Ignoring its own procedural safeguards--an unprecedented move--the college administration suspended him indefinitely. Then a tape of the class surfaced. It exonerated Hearlson.

Despite unimpeachable proof, 24 college professors signed a petition demanding further sanctions against Hearlson, yet none against the students who slandered their colleague. "The four students who raised complaints were factually wrong in their accusations," one of the petition signers haplessly explained to the Weekly Standard. "However, they were inferentially correct."

At about the same time, a group of federal Forest Service employees opposed to human use of certain public forests in the Pacific Northwest deliberately doctored animal field surveys to show that a rare endangered species lived in the area. Even normally sympathetic media like the Seattle Times were outraged by such misconduct. "Efforts to manage wildlife under the already controversial Endangered Species Act have been hurt," it lamented. Some in Congress called for an investigation.

But none of the Service's miscreants has yet been fired, charged, or apparently even reprimanded. All continue to act in their official capacities. The government steadfastly refuses to even release their names. Counseling, Forest Service officials insist, is the appropriate remedy.

In late November, a newly hired Notre Dame football coach resigned in disgrace before coaching a single game. Twenty-year-old discrepancies in his resume had been unearthed by the press. Years of subsequent on-field success went by the boards. No matter what his accomplishments, it was unthinkable that a man with such a tarnished background could possibly lead a major intercollegiate sports team.

Meanwhile, the federal Office of Research Integrity, a government watchdog agency, publicly announced that an influential study by Steven Arnold, a Tulane researcher who purportedly found that chemicals are disrupting our hormones, was completely fabricated. In the late 1990s, Arnold's findings were used by the EPA to justify a whole new range of exorbitantly costly regulations, supposedly to ensure that chemical products would not adversely affect human endocrine systems. The ORI findings, however, showed that this entire program was without foundation.

Arnold's punishment? He was banned for five years from applying for federal funds. The EPA? It continues to enforce the same rules based on Arnold's discredited research.

Such post terror incidents sit uneasily with claims that our priorities were somehow clarified after 9/11. We waged war in Afghanistan, rediscovered our vulnerability and rallied behind a once marginally popular president. But we still apparently hold football coaches to higher ethical standards than government scientists or federal agencies. Demonstrably innocent victims can be hounded well after their full exoneration on the basis of mere inferences while those who are unambiguously guilty of disgraceful conduct are merely coddled.

I don't know why my neighbor's son killed himself this Christmas. All morning long the paramedics and the police milled in front of the house waiting for the coroner to arrive. Kids were playing with new toys up and down the street. We hushed a few that strayed too close to the house.

Later that day, we went to a Christmas party. The food was good, the company festive. We watched the Lakers beat the Philadelphia 76ers. A half-moon, set off by Jupiter's white blaze, lit our path back home. We passed by our neighbor's house in silence.

Perhaps, I thought, clarity will reveal itself more fully in the coming year.