THE NEWS THAT FIVE SUSPECTED ISLAMIC TERRORISTS plotting a murderous attack on Fort Dix all lived (or had once lived) in Cherry Hill, N.J., was almost comical in a scary, unfunny way. It was like finding out that Huey and Riley Freeman the angry suburban black nationalists pre-teens from Timid Deer Lane from Boondocks had actually planned to assassinate their middle school principal. We live in a world where the usual suspects kill each other at an alarming rate in the city of Philadelphia, where a milkman can murder innocents in an Amish schoolhouse, where a deranged Korean immigrant can mow down dozens of students and teachers on a mountainside college campus in Virginia. So why wouldn't we believe that a Philadelphia cab driver and a suburban pizza deliveryman would join forces with other illegal immigrants to murder members of the armed forces of the country they sought out to find freedom and a new way of life?

Because to most of us it seems preposterous, that's why. We can't wrap our minds around it. It's too mundane, too bizarre, too hideous to contemplate. You can't hail a cab in Philadelphia without being asked your destination by a driver speaking English with an accent from a country thousands of miles away. The same with home delivery fast food. The news that one of the the alleged terrorist plotters from Cherry Hill delivered for a pizza parlor called Mario's invited images of a Donkey Kong-type video game with the massively bearded and mustacioed Mario Brother Jihadists leaping over barrels and other obstacles rolled down at them by Uncle Sam.

But it isn't a game is it? It's as real as the computer screen you're reading. Nine-eleven really happened. Nickle Mines schoolhouse really happened. Virginia Tech really happened. The slaughter in North and West Philadelphia really happens. And yet life goes on somehow. There is happiness and pride and love and expectations we all feel, even though we know that none of us gets out of this world alive. There may be a heaven or a paradise waiting at the end of that, but I don't know if that gives us the courage to open our eyes in the morning. Of all the lessons America has learned from Sept. 11, 2001, the one most real to me, the one I can visualize more clearly than all the images we have seen a thousand times, is the indivisible lesson we learned from Flight 93. Average Americans siezing the moment, fighting until the end. Together.