AMERICANS MUST GET USED TO BEING CAUTIOUS.

Byline: Samantha Kimmel

OUR world, as the United States knows it, has been turned on its ear. The unconscionable, terrifying acts of planes being flown into buildings, of people on another plane literally giving their lives to save others on the ground, have served to tilt us on our axis.

I was shocked, horrified, bent and wracked with tears and grief for the actions of Sept. 11. But I was not surprised.

The night before the attacks, I was sitting with some friends, who were curious about my aversion to unattended packages. I had called attention earlier that day to a pretty unobtrusive object: a pink, plush toy kitten. It was, seemingly, unclaimed. No one was around it, I could hear no small child wailing for her lost kitty.

So I called security for the building. While we waited, I tried to explain to my puzzled fellows that when I lived in the Middle East, anything unaccompanied, from a briefcase to a cigarette package, was to be considered a bomb.

It was just that simple.

This high level of caution saved lives, including mine once.

I was on a bus, heading from the kibbutz where I lived into Nazareth, when the driver suddenly stopped the bus in the middle of a long stretch of dirt road. He screamed for us to get off the bus.

As the last person leaped from the steps, the tiny package just behind the driver's seat exploded. We were all uninjured.

The driver had noticed, barely in time, the small, brown-paper-wrapped, unattended package and took action that saved us all.

I have been in the Egged bus station in Jerusalem when it was cleared because someone spotted a cigarette box lying on the sidewalk. The bomb squad was called in. They had to defuse the box. It was a bomb.

While I attended Hebrew University of Jerusalem, two terrorists were sitting on a bench at the western campus of the university with a bomb in one of their laps, waiting for the perfect time to deliver it to a more populated area of the school.

Fortunately for us, and perhaps because God willed it, their timing was a tad off, and the device exploded where they sat, blowing them, as they say, away.

That night was a long one for those of us in the dormitories: doing a head count of friends while rumors run rampant about the number of deaths and casualties is nerve-racking. As the people of New York City and Washington, D.C., now know.

So, as I sat there explaining my trepidation of unclaimed items - even of a tiny plush toy - to my friends as they looked at me as if I'd lost my mind, I was swept up with a sense of urgency, of a need to impart to these people the truth of the matter: We are not in a safe world. We are in a scary, uncertain world, a world where others will try to harm us, egregiously, though we perceive we have done them no harm at all.

And the plush kitty? It was just a plush toy, not a fuzzy bomb. Before security arrived (which they never did, by the way) a woman walked past, with the toy in her hand, saying, ``My daughter forgot this!''

But I know that on the morning of Sept. 11, my words came starkly, bizarrely true. The acts of that morning have served to make us into a people we never thought we could ever possibly become, but I hope we will stay: cautious.