I went to New York City last weekend for a bar mitzvah, and I don't know why, maybe because I was going in for a longstanding social engagement, but I was totally unprepared for the sight of the new skyline of the island where I had lived for over 20 years. It is one thing to see the images on TV and in the papers and magazines; but it was quite a jolt to see it with the naked eye, still with a pall of smoke.

And so while walking down Second Avenue a bit later, I was struck by a T-shirt in a shop window with "Whatever . . ." printed across the front. I stopped and stared. "Whatever . . ." ? Well, 6,000-plus lives-ever. The mantra of an age of irony suddenly seemed trite and irrelevant.

A week before, I thought to myself, that might have worked in that world-weary way in which everything was considered a target for irreverence. Throughout the prosperous 1990s, we laughed with Jerry Seinfeld and his gang, giggled with patronizing interest at America's kitsch culture, believed that the Internet was ushering in a new world order and became ever more obsessed with the material excellence of our lives.

Occasionally, reality broke into our daydream, but we often managed to make a soap opera even of that. Witness the maudlin outpouring that followed the death of Diana, the "People's Princess." And such major events as the Gulf War and the first bombing of the World Trade Center and the federal building in Oklahoma City, came and went but never dented an era of glib frivolity.

Perhaps in an age of peace and prosperity it is easy to be cynical -- nothing is earnest or real. This detached coolness was most apparent in the GenX generation. Maybe because their parents' political idealism had been tempered by the cynicism that followed Watergate, wide-eyed commitment seemed naive and vulnerable.

Better to hide behind a Mad magazine facade of "What, me worry?" Now that has changed. Some things do matter, and watching thousands of people die is one of them.

There are many images from Sept. 11 that we will live with for the rest of our lives. The one I find most disturbing is the account of people fleeing down the emergency stairs in the World Trade Center as firefighters were coming up laden with equipment. A man who got out said the firefighters provided a sense of calm that might otherwise have been missing. But those firefighters, hundreds of them, were trudging to their deaths.

"Whatever . . ." does not begin to work with such images.