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All the news this past month about moving the trial of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed out of downtown Manhattan has gotten me thinking about the many ways Sept. 11 has become a marker. We divide life into before and after, use the event as a way of judging the world and hold it up as a yardstick for understanding news (“another Sept. 11,” “the next,” “worse than”).

To use a literary metaphor, the attack was our Paradise Lost. We were kicked out of the Garden and lost so much innocence. Remember when we could travel with our shoes on? When office towers in Times Square weren’t routinely evacuated over security threats? When our government didn’t have an excuse for wiretapping or waterboarding?

Along with the specific ways the tragedy has affected travel, security and civil liberties, it has had a pervasive effect on American confidence, both in the country’s infallibility and in its role in the world. Ten years ago, we felt invulnerable and trusted that we were the center of gravity. Now we’re afraid, and people talk at dinner parties about whether they should be learning Mandarin.

Sept. 11 was supposed to be the end of the age of irony, as Graydon Carter so infamously pointed out. We got over that, and have Gawker and Perez Hilton to prove it, but in so many other ways we haven’t bounced back—and probably never will. “The terrorists have won” is often said as an (ironic) joke, but in some ways it’s true: Our “after” is not our “before.”

The country has changed and grown more divided than ever. It’s worth noting that one of our most polarizing public figures has spun 9/11 into a marketing slogan for his political agenda. Glenn Beck’s populist 9.12 Project is officially based on 9 principles and 12 values (smaller government chief among them), but those numbers aren’t a coincidence: The mission statement says the project is “designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked…we were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.”

I don’t agree with Beck’s views or believe his road map is the best way back, but I think a lot of us would like to return to something like the America we used to live in.