We’re stuck in a post-9-11 pattern that is frightening and will be a long time with us.

“We need luck full-time, every time : they have to be lucky only once.” We tend to realize that more each day in the troubling aftermath of 9-11-01.

An analyst was discussing counter-terrorism and terrorism, and how impossible it is for anti-criminal elements to be flawless. When the recent siege of sniper attacks began to provide layer after layer of concern and fear in America, we perhaps for the first time realized just how unlikely it is we can apprehend and prevent the devastation that can result from twisted minds. When someone is dedicated to harming others, there is no fail-safe way to step on all the lumps in the rug at one time.

Even after the tragedies of 9-11-01 there was some semblance of identification of the guilty and the people behind them. Then came the feelings of hopelessness, vulnerability and frustration during the sniper rampage.

Was this an al-Qaida venture of “terrorism on the cheap”? Had some aberrant misfit planner decided how inexpensive it could be to dispatch two or three agents in unmarked vehicles with simple weapons and easy access to victims? Was this a test pattern, only the first of a wave of such assaults, or could there possibly be Charles Manson- and Ted Kaczynski-type malcontents attempting to “get even” for something or somebody?

If we found the enemy elusive in the 9-11 matter, consider the excruciating pain of law enforcement people in trying to cope with this kind of threat.

As it turned out, the two men arrested for the carnage, a man and a boy, so to speak, may have had Osama bin Laden-style leanings and inspiration. But apparently they were not firsthand products of the system as were the 19 killers in September of 2001.

That made it all the more difficult for people to track down the perpetrators. It is to the credit of the American public and the law people that they got a break in the case as soon and as thoroughly as they did. The pattern was maddening. “Terrorism on the cheap” could have gone on much, much longer. And could yet.

What about the dangers of copycat behavior, where others who feel they have been wronged or mistreated or suffer from something like “troublesome childhoods” decide on similar guerrilla attacks?

Writes Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times: “Naturally, any terror rampage of this sort would have attracted national attention, especially now that the cable news networks are there to fan stories all day and all night long. But the intensity of the spotlight on the snipers, and the fear they engendered, may have also been a function of just how well they fit the 9-11 paradigm (or pattern). It was almost as if they were consciously acting out a knowledge of how 9-ll affected us – of how it had given us all a case of the jitters. These were rare serious killers who actively reinforced our vulnerability, the arbitrariness of death and the imminence of evil that had entered the American mind. The snipers were expressions of 9-11. : For that is the world in which we now find ourselves. It is a place where men plow planes into skyscrapers, where lunatics send anthrax spores through the mail, where maniacs snatch little girls off sidewalks or from their bedrooms, where snipers casually shoot people pumping gas or loading packages into their cars. It is, alas, a real world, though perhaps one that is not all that different from the world before 9-11, where atrocities also occurred. What makes it seem so different is that everything is of a piece now that we have reconceptualized the world to demonstrate the terror we have seen and felt. It is a world made in the image of our new paradigm, and it is frightening.”

Troubling as it is, all this is a “paradigm” that we will have to confront and deal with for years and years to come. And we’re going to need a huge increase in our luck because that has been occurring too infrequently for us while “theirs” has no bounds.