The nation actually has not changed since Sept. 11. I thought it had. But we're just using new tools for old habits. First, Jerry Falwell, who has spent his career railing against abortionists, feminism and homosexuality, reacted to the terrorist attacks by saying God was punishing ... abortionists, feminism and homosexuality. What muddles his logic is that the attack was on the Wall Street area, meaning avarice took a more direct hit than lust or even gluttony or idolatry, which are all located further uptown.

Then all the people who don't like immigrants merely turned up their volume – such as the woman I just saw at a convenience store who repeatedly asked the foreign man behind the counter, "Can you look me in the eye and say you're not a spy?" So he did, allowing this woman to go back to spending her children's food money on lottery tickets.

Most of all, though, people in South Jersey are stealing flags.

This has to be the most embarrassing trend we could have come up with. As the United States discovers a new sense of national purpose, I keep hearing reports of flags disappearing. A woman in Sewell had hers stolen off her car antenna during a back-to-school night. A woman in Pennsauken lost hers along with the antenna to which it was attached. A couple in Cherry Hill had two flags stolen from in front of their house – in two separate thefts that took place hours apart.

Somebody even stole a 24-by-40-foot American flag off the roof of American Legion Post 72 in Brooklawn. That's 960 square feet of flag. My apartment is smaller. My apartment is a lot smaller.

Man. I've got to move.

And who's stealing these flags? Terrorists? You think they're impaling themselves on car antennae, and having their compatriots go on TV afterward to say, "American pigs! Look what we did to your Trans Am! It will never drive right again! Not unless you get a wheel alignment! And you are too stupid and lazy to get a wheel alignment! Look how long it took you just to replace your muffler!"

No, we all know who the most likely suspects are. "Teenagers out looking for trouble," Pennsauken Police Capt. Earl Griffin said resignedly. These probably also are the same types who – on three separate occasions along Union and Rudderow streets – set a bunch of flags on fire, he said.

"It's not a protest," Griffin said. "It's vandalism."

The thefts probably aren't for profit, either, he added. Thieves just keep the flags, the exception being the giant flag off the American Legion Post, which can be resold – presumably to someone who expresses patriotism by purchasing a giant flag from a guy he met in the middle of the night at a bowling alley.

How does all this express our identity? Because even before Sept. 11, people out here already were stealing anything that wasn't glued down. The suburbs were where larceny increased the most throughout the United States last year. And in New Jersey between 1990 and 1999, 75 percent of all reported larcenies took place in towns with populations of less than 50,000.

Which is to say that bored suburbanites before Sept. 11 are still bored after Sept. 11.

It reminds me of all those folks who keep saying nowadays that, whatever they were doing before the terrorist attacks – whether they were working at strip clubs, polluting the rivers, conning old people or stalking Carrot Top – no matter how selfish or trivial the activity, it suddenly becomes noble to continue it because, if they don't, "Then the terrorists win."

Maybe that's what some patriotic, Pennsauken vandal told his friends. "Sure, we're all depressed, we all want to shut down," he said. "But then, who will steal America's flags, key its SUVs or write ‘Eat me’ on the sides of its housing projects? If not for us – we few, we happy few, we band of brothers – who will egg the nation's houses, throw wet marshmallows at its windshields or, if nothing else, paint its dogs?"

Then he probably set his hand on fire by accident because, really, anybody who steals a flag has to be a friggin' idiot to begin with.