In the weeks and months after Sept. 11, 2001, we heard a lot about how people were so shocked by the attack on our country that they were really re-evaluating what mattered. Trivial things like reality TV, celebrity news and sports seemed so much less important when we were fresh off the deaths of more than 3,000 innocent Americans.

Another development that’s at least partly a result of &uot;9-11&uot; is that the economy has been in the tank. For the last few years, headlines have included layoffs, cutbacks and high unemployment.

But things have been changing recently. We’ve been hearing there are signs that the economy is rebounding and that it will keep getting better. People are buying more things and job losses have slowed.

And the somber, reflective mood has somewhat dissipated. The second anniversary of Sept. 11 was marked not by widespread services, TV specials and commemorative sections in newspapers, like the first anniversary was. A few flags were at half-mast, memorial services in Minnesota were lightly attended and a quick flip through the broadcast networks during prime-time Thursday revealed a repeat of CSI and a couple new sitcoms, &uot;Whoopi&uot; and &uot;The Mullets.&uot; No sign of a big news event, like there was last year.

Recently, cultural critics have said they are noticing that Americans seem ready to turn much of their attention back to the trivialities that occupied them before the terrorist attacks. The antics of Britney Spears and Madonna at the MTV Video Music Awards grabbed headlines recently, as has celebrity-tinged &uot;news&uot; like Kobe Bryant’s legal trouble. Reality TV seems to have actually grown in popularity; in fact, Fox was running &uot;Temptation Island 3&uot; on the evening of the second &uot;9-11&uot; anniversary.

This is interesting to me because, unless I’m wrong, the improvement in the economy and the willingness of Americans to get back to the more trivial pleasures in life are intertwined.

Our economy is based, basically, on people buying a lot of stuff, most of which they don’t really need. Going shopping, eating at restaurants, watching movies, taking vacations, buying DVD players and X-Boxes and computers &045; that’s the kind of stuff that people weren’t doing in the dreary months after Sept. 11, 2001. Getting all that money flowing again is what helps businesses hire more people, place new production orders and hand out pay raises, which the employees then turn around and spend again. I’m no economist, but that’s pretty much how it works.

So, there’s a paradox here. Everybody acted like this was going to be a much more serious America now, and that everybody was going to get their priorities straight. Maybe many of us have. For sure, nobody will forget Sept. 11 and how that day felt. But at the same time, what the president and others meant when they said we should &uot;live our lives&uot; after the attacks was basically that we should go right back to the trivial stuff &045; the X-Boxes and the new SUVs. That was how the economy was going to rebound. The economy doesn’t get pumped up when people are sitting at home with their families or attending candlelight vigils.

Polls are now showing that Americans think the president should focus more on the economy than on the war against terror. But at the same time, preventing more terrorist attacks is exactly how to keep Americans focused on being good consumers, getting that economy going, instead of being depressed or worried.

In that way, the people who said the terrorists win if we let them change our way of life were right.

(Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays. E-mail him at dylan. belden@albertleatribune.com.)