The hands of President Bush during a moment of silence at the Fort Pitt Firehouse in New York on Monday. The door in the picture is from a fire truck that responded to the attacks on the World Trade Center. (AP)

Los Angeles, Sept. 11: Airport trash cans overflow with toothpaste and deodorant.

Thousands of college students bend their heads over Arabic texts.

In Minneapolis, networks of sensors continually sample air for anthrax, smallpox and bubonic plague. In Nebraska, governor Dave Heineman is alerted when cars with out-of-state licence plates are spotted.

In a gravel road in rural Indiana, the Amish Country Popcorn factory makes the federal list of potential terrorist targets — a list of 77,069. Five years after September 11, this is the new normal.

Nearly 3,000 Americans died when terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, one into the Pentagon and another into a field in Pennsylvania.

Documentary filmmaker Ric Burns calls the attack “as seismic as an event can be …. Rarely does the future announce itself so vividly and horrifyingly”.

Residents of New York and Washington remain edgy. And those who lost loved ones, or have relatives or friends serving in the military abroad, can’t help but be reminded all too often of September 11.

Remarkably, though, the day-to-day lives of most Americans have changed very little. We have found it easy, perhaps startlingly easy, to stick to routines and habits and mind-sets forged before we could have conceived of planes as missiles.

Last month, the Pew Research Center polled about 1,500 adults across the country. More than 40 per cent said the terrorist attacks had not changed their personal lives at all. And 36 per cent said their lives had been altered “only a little bit."

September 11 is often compared to another day of infamy, Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Historians, however, see no comparison. World War II demanded personal sacrifice from every American family. The global war on terrorism has touched only a few directly, even as the threat level bounces from orange to yellow to orange to red.

“Many of the predictions made five years ago by cultural pundits about positive long-term changes on our behaviour, on our attitudes, even on the art we make, have proved largely untrue,” says novelist Julia Glass, who won a National Book Award for Three Junes.

She finds the lack of transformation depressing, a moment missed. “You could say it’s because human beings are so good at adapting,” Glass suggests. “Or because we tend toward a certain set point of selfishness and complacency.”

That capacity for moving on, for getting back to normal, infuriated Sergeant Jay White when he was home last summer between tours of duty in Iraq. “It used to drive him nuts when we were standing in line and somebody was complaining about their Frappuccino,” recalls his wife, Jessica.

Jessica feels that same frustration at the high school in Cromwell, Connecticut, where she teaches history.

“It’s a feeling of isolation and loneliness and confusion,” she says. Her husband left on his most recent deployment less than three weeks after their wedding.

Though most Americans have seen little change in their lives, many do recognise the effect September 11 had on their neighbours and on society as a whole. In the Pew poll, 51 per cent said their country had changed “in a major way”.

Those changes are not exactly what the pundits predicted in the days after September 11. Back then, President Bush publicly wrapped the top Democrat in the Senate, Tom Daschle, in a bear hug; unity in the face of adversity seemed the only possible course. But fighting terrorism proved a sharply partisan issue — and all too susceptible to fear-mongering.

“National security has become just another political weapon to beat each other up with,” says Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton.