KENNETT, Mo. -- Much has happened in America and elsewhere since Sept. 11 plus 12 months, and some of it, thank heavens, has been for the better, which, of course, signals that matters were worse in the preceding era.

Perhaps the best observation made from last September to this September is that the United States will never be the same, although the details of this transformation are a wee bit difficult to nail down, if only because the changes are still occurring with little sign of their ending soon.

The loss of lives in just one terrorist attack, with its three stages, was shocking to those who believed we were living in the era of undisputed peace. Indeed, we took it for granted that America was somehow immune to the turmoil in other lands and within foreign societies that, realistically speaking, did not influence our American Way of Life to any great degree.

America was the oasis, the land of the brave and the home of the free, a description we bestowed upon ourselves and one reinforced by much of the world.

No harm would come to us because, after all, we were the mightiest nation in the history of mankind, possessing more firepower than all the arsenals that ever existed in all previous history.

We were also invulnerable, we reasoned, because other nations, other races, other religions, other societies wanted to be just like us and would try to emulate our oasis of vision and virtue.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, we were wrong.

What we had only assumed was envy turned out to be a strange, erratic but comprehensible judgment that altered the perceived level of the United States to selfish capitalism, which tolerated no dissent, neither active nor passive, from the poorer, less powerful countries around our huge world. Our bywords of freedom and justice and brotherhood, while uttered in true belief by our politicians, our press and our corporate apologists, fell on the deaf ears of those who pointed to our unnoticed failures and our too often indifference to others.

We err if we believe our detractors lacked sufficient evidence for their indictments: indifference to the rights of minorities, a corporate greed that made billionaires at the expense of workers who could not earn enough to meet a medical emergency, a dissolution of family life that all faiths and all societies deem an essential component of a nation's greatness.

Along the way we risked the endless hatred of other societies by befriending nihilistic dictators if they supported our policies and bestowing our favors on governments that sometimes violated every rule in our own Constitution.

Furthermore, when we raised the flag of righteousness and unleashed our military strength, we more often than not sided with those who promised to be our friends. And, making matters worse, we never seemed to question the insincerity of the despots whose aims were not for the benefit of their people but their tenure in positions of power. In short, we too often became the collarbone of the side with more weapons, indifferent to those who had no weapons at all.

Whether in the Far East or Middle East or in our own Caribbean neighborhood, we imposed policies that often penalized not the leaders of rogue dictatorships but their oppressed citizens, inflicting pain as severe as death through economic sanctions that dealt suffering only to the innocent.

It didn't take a pompous TV commentator to observe that these diplomatic dichotomies were punishing the innocent and inflating the power of the guilty, yet this important issue never seemed to rate even one mention during our presidential and congressional campaigns. It is interesting to speculate how Bush and Gore could have responded to such flaws in U.S. policies.

Sept. 11 occurred, primarily, because religious fanatics were persuaded that America had no interest in protecting the rights of all people, only those of its friends. As advocates and perpetrators of such myopic policies, America became the target of those who were willing to risk their lives to cast just one vote against our society.

The dichotomy of our most recent enemy-in-hiding, the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, is that we oppose it on the grounds that it is evil to our allies, our friends and ourselves, not that it has committed untold atrocities against its own citizens and other religious enemies.

In seeking to corral the excesses of Saddam, we have embargoed foodstuffs and medicines, the lack of which has brought death to thousands of innocent children and families.

If, in seeking to overthrow the current regime, we inflict further suffering on innocent men, women and children, the dichotomy will not be lost on the rest of the world which will hate us with even greater intensity.

Recently developed plans to bomb Saddam's Iraq off the face of the earth may or may not bring about that government's collapse, but it will earn for America generations after generations of hatred and bitterness that will ultimately result in more tragic terrorist attacks on our citizens.

If we are to defeat the evils of Saddam's regime, we must do so in concert with other free societies around the world. Lacking this, we will inherit the undying hatred of ordinary citizens the world over, which is an even greater force than Saddam could gather in a millennium.

If we ignore this, future generations of Americans will bear the odious consequences of an America isolated from the rest of the world, a world in which we cannot hope to exert influence or serve as a beacon for free, enlightened and democratic societies governed by wise, intelligent and responsible leaders.

As Americans learned on Sept. 11, 2001, the consequences of wrong decisions can last for years, even decades. It is a lesson we ignore at our risk and one we need to recall and relearn in the weeks and months ahead.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News & Editorial Service.