UNTIL LAST week, the phrase "die for your country" smacked of oppression and backslapping machismo to many of my peers: why would you die for a label? Before last week, I’d never seen real national unity, real similarities between Texans and Bostonians, real brotherhood. Genuine displays of patriotism gave me the creeps: unguarded allegiance to anything seemed so gauche, so suburban — unless you were a veteran or Kid Rock, or it was the Fourth of July. Only with a wink and a snide sense of irony did it seem fitting to walk around with an American flag on your chest. But irony, it seems now, is a product of luxury and security — as are sarcasm, snobbery, and criticism. Last Tuesday’s terrorist attacks struck all those public indulgences down, at least temporarily.

In her essay "The White Album," Joan Didion writes about her discovery of personal mortality after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis: "I had, at this time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife." And last Tuesday, as America realized that if we left our windows open, the stranger with the knife might actually crawl in, people my age were shocked to learn of the stranger’s existence. As Didion elaborates, "The improbable had become the probable, the norm: things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone."

For us twentysomethings, it meant that blaring sirens could be the horsemen of the Apocalypse, that AP news feeds could be inextricably linked to horror, and that even Howard Stern (who once wondered on air why the Columbine kids didn’t try to have sex with the good-looking girls before they shot the place up) could rise to the occasion and demand that tabloid reporters use their extraordinary skill at smoking out celebrities to hunt down terrorists. It meant that Times Square could be eerily vacant, that MTV’s Carson Daly could hint at undergoing self-evaluation, and that the Big City — where friends went to chase dreams, and where everything was cooler, dirtier, and open later — could erupt into an epochal nightmare.

For twentysomethings, last Tuesday also meant that we could die. Personally, I don’t think I was entirely convinced that Americans under 30 were destructible until last week. A month ago, I would’ve told you that of course we are mortal, of course I could get caught in crossfire, of course I could be diagnosed with terminal cancer tomorrow. But on some subconscious level, I didn’t believe it: I thought mortality nabbed Americans after our children were in kindergarten, after we’d bought a house, or after we turned 40.

But as it turns out, we’re not invincible. Jobs can dwindle, cash flow can dry up, and Asia isn’t just a place to go backpacking. Anyone old enough to be incensed and frightened by last week’s calamity, yet young enough to have never known America vulnerable, now knows for certain that everything isn’t rosy. Sadly, we had to learn this in one of the worst ways possible.

Every day, I wake up and think I’ve grasped the magnitude of this tragedy, accepted the fact that we’ve been attacked, come to terms with the reality that someone overseas who knows nothing about me wants me dead. But each new day brings new videotape, new testimony, new perspectives, new headlines, new evidence of the violent racist backlash brewing here at home. By the time this is published, America could be at war, the stock market could have bottomed out. Undoubtedly, the world — still uncomprehending — will still be bracing itself for the future.

So where does that leave us? We could employ clichés: the end of innocence, the future is ours, life will never be the same, the end of ignorance, the rules have changed. But platitudes seem garishly irresponsible, given that more than 5000 people are dead and that we, an unprepared straggle of twentysomethings, will inherit the repercussions of a monumental terrorist attack. Maybe we’ve just witnessed the end of unbridled irony. Maybe a coddled generation that bathed itself in sarcasm will get serious. Maybe we’ll stop acting so jaded and start addressing the problem. Maybe not. Maybe we don’t know where the events of the last week have left us, and maybe that’s the least shocking thing we’ve learned.

For myself, the story isn’t all bad. Like many of my twentysomething brethren, I am a product of a broken marriage. And in my personal narrative, at least one good thing came of last Tuesday’s cataclysm. On September 11, 2001, for the first time in 20 years, my 64-year-old mother told my 70-year-old father that she loved him. Two weeks ago, I would’ve been embarrassed by the moment; last week it practically moved me to tears.

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com.