When I was in high school, one of the greatest running jokes among my friends was that we were living during the 1950's. We talked about "plastics" and the "nuclear families," how repressed and uptight everyone was, how with a conservative government we might revert back to those patterns at any time. I often heard it remarked that our headmaster, a rather out of touch grandfatherly figure, was still stuck in the 50's. One of my classmates, a political activist, liked to refer to himself as a "Red," wear a furry Bolshevik hat and remark that he was "taking over the school." The iconography girls in plaid skirts, fathers smoking pipes, blacklisted actors, and anti-communist propaganda were common. But this was more than a retro subculture. It was a statement comparing our present with our country's past declaring that never again would we live sheltered and superficial existences due to fear of difference and paranoia. If we'd known Stalin and Lenin we would have invited them to go smoke dope with us because they threatened America's closed, self-centered worldview and rocked the boat.

Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that we, the rebels, might cherish safety over adventure, the known over the unknown. Never did I expect to see so many of them, who daily grumbled about the pushy Christian proselytizers, light a candle and pray. Never did we expect to see ourselves as patriotic Americans standing at war against a common enemy. We didn't believe in wars particularly the kind America would be involved in. But in less than a week I have seen all of this come to pass.

The Soviet Union fell when I was a small child. I can remember when they changed the globe in our classroom but not an awareness of why or what it meant. I've never known fear for my country or fear for my safety as an American. Growing up I always had nightmares about AIDS, plane crashes, and school shootings. All of these things still matter to me just as much. None now feel trivial in hindsight. But to fear the safety of your country itself, to imagine chemical weapons being dropped on you and everyone you love is something previously unknown to me. I wish, perhaps more than I've ever wished for anything, that I could return to innocence.

But when I walked home after classes were canceled on Tuesday I could see smoke behind the Washington Monument, just three blocks from my apartment. When I walked alone through my neighborhood after midnight, I saw tanks lining the streets and paused to look at them in awe. But a policeman saw me watching and began to shout. "Hey you! Come here!" Even I was suspect. When I was talking to a friend online and my connection was momentarily interrupted, she began to panic. "NEVER do that to me again!" she wrote. She didn't know whether I'd died sitting in that computer lab, trying to tell her I was all right. And, when I finally was able to return home to Boston at the end of the week, my Amtrak sped through New Jersey past the remains of the WTC across the river in Manhattan and I saw the dark gray clouds filling the sky and imagined the debris of paper and disintegrated bodies at their source. I am no longer innocent. I no longer view community service announcements as a nagging intrusion but a way of conveying news. War is now real and I've never been so afraid.

I fear that in the years that follow we may see a return to a 50's mentality that Arabics may be all but blacklisted from some businesses, the wings of America's youth will be clipped and our privacy and dignity as individuals will suffer. I'm concerned that much of the rest of my young adulthood will be spent being cautious instead of experimenting, as I'd always intended, and that youthful exuberance may, for a time, be interrupted by an infuriating sense of rules and order. It doesn't seem quite fair probably because it isn't. But after coming to understand the 50's images in a new way I now realize that I am not the first and may not be the last to face the conflicts of cautious living and carefree dying. I feel like it's a very crushing blow to my generation and regret the fact that we'll never be the same. But as I imagine boarding an American Airlines flight to Los Angeles half expecting to see Bin Ladden through the window, crouched on the wing and ripping out the engine, I am hard pressed to know what to suggest. Caution? Or freedom? Living my life in fear? Or perhaps one day not living anymore? Can these really be the only choices? Will I ever know a college that feels like a college again?

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