The Subtle Changes Since 9/11

Feeling Less Safe

And here is Roya Lovell, coming home from a long day at work and opening her refrigerator, where there is a bright-orange bottle of expired amoxicillin behind the A1 sauce.

It is vestigial, she realizes, a useless thing that she can't quite bring herself to part with.

"I had this fear of a biological attack," Lovell said, explaining that she has kept the antibiotic for years in case it could protect her kids in another terrorist attack. "Who knows if this antibiotic still works, but I was kind of like, why not keep it?"

She poured herself a glass of iced tea.

Lovell, who works in financial services in Herndon, would put herself with the 63 percent who responded in a national poll this summer by Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times that Sept. 11 has not changed the way they live. After all, life carries on.

But now and then, Lovell sees the amoxicillin. And she thinks about things -- about the foiled terrorist plots, about her friend who works for Homeland Security and who told her how easily a biological attack could be pulled off, about how much more hatred there seems to be for the United States.

"There's so much intervention, with us in Iraq, and the fighting in Lebanon. . . . I don't know," she said. "There's more anger."

It adds up to her feeling less safe five years later, not more.

And so, Lovell said, she thinks about how to prepare her children for the next terrorist attack, which she considers inevitable. "I think of how to prepare myself, how to prepare my family," she said. "I always think about where my brother lives, 15 minutes away from D.C. I always tell him, 'You need to move out of the area.' But I never tell him why."

Sometimes, wheeling down the bottled-water aisle in the grocery store, she thinks about stockpiling -- "I think, liquid, liquid, liquid," Lovell said. She will not fly in a plane with her children, because she imagines a scene in which they look at her and she has to tell them there's nothing she can do.

For the most part, though, these sorts of darker thoughts are confined to her morning commute, when she's alone for a solid hour, heading closer to the District, one of the most obvious terrorist targets in the world.

It is difficult not to think about it then, about the United Airlines flight that crashed into a Pennsylvania field instead of the U.S. Capitol or the White House. It is difficult to brush aside the idea that if plans were thwarted, they also remain unfinished.