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, Gov. Dave Heineman is alerted when cars with out-of-state license plates are spotted cruising cattle feedlots. On 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 Sept. 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 Sept. 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 mindsets forged before we conceived of planes as missiles.

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

Not like Pearl Harbor

Sept. 11 is often compared to another day of infamy, Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Historians, however, see no comparison. World War II demanded personal sacrifice from every American family. The global war on terror 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 behavior, 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.”

In fact, while most Americans have seen little change in their lives, many do recognize the effect Sept. 11 had on their neighbors and on society as a whole. In last month’s Pew poll, 51 percentsaid their country had changed “in a major way.”

Those changes are not exactly what the pundits predicted in the days after Sept. 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 Panetta, former chief of staff to President Clinton.

It’s also become a top priority for many voters, a noted change from decades past.

Conspiracies and faith

Immediately after the terrorist strikes, 64 percent of Americans said they trusted their government to do the right thing all or most of the time. By the summer of 2002, that number had dropped to 39 percent.

In the weeks after the attacks, many pundits predicted Americans would turn to God in their moment of stress, and for a time, church attendance shot up. Polls showed Americans grappling with big questions about God and salvation.

The revival lasted three months.

By January, church attendance was back to normal. The Barna Group, a Christian polling firm, found no movement in standard measures of faith, such as Bible reading.

“Spiritually speaking, it’s as if nothing significant ever happened,” says David Kinnaman, a Barna vice president.

Redirected focus

So what, then, has changed since Sept. 11?

The American Civil Liberties Union has devoted huge resources to fighting Bush administration policies such as eavesdropping without a warrant on certain phone calls and imprisoning American citizens indefinitely, without charges or access to a lawyer. Those efforts have clearly resonated: ACLU membership has grown more than 80 percent, revenue has jumped 34 percent, and the group has nearly doubled the size of its national staff.

The government, too, has been consumed by its new focus on terrorism. The FBI’s budget has doubled. Federal spending on air security has quadrupled. Homeland Security has checked 2.7 million truckers against a terrorist watch list.

Shock waves from Sept. 11 reverberate still, but carrying on with the familiar humdrum of our lives lets us feel stable, even as radiation detectors are installed at the Super Bowl and security guards at the airport order us to toss our bottled water.

“Probably no American life is totally unaffected by 9/11, but very few people are immobilized or totally preoccupied with it,” says Robert Lifton, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.