A month after the attack, I was in a restaurant in St. Louis with people in the human-rights business, one of them a lawyer from Rwanda who had taken up a position at the United Nations. He had arrived in New York on Sept. 10. Questioned about the mood in the stricken city, he shrugged and insisted that he was "the wrong person to ask." Everyone around the table nodded knowingly, but I remember thinking that he was an excellent person to ask. Who better to help America put 9/11 into a wider, global perspective?

Even now, many Americans seem to need someone to explain why 80 per cent of the Muslim boys born last year in the northern Nigerian city of Kano were named Osama. Or why T-shirts bearing the face of Osama bin Laden are doing brisk business in countries such as Indonesia, Sudan and even South Africa. Or why, when President George W. Bush boiled down 9/11's complexities into "you're with us or against us," he earned his nation about three billion enemies in one soundbite.

We can all recall stories of great courage and humanity that emerged in the wake of the tragedy. But others have not aged gracefully - like the one about the businessmen stranded in New Brunswick who were in such a big rush they dropped $15,000 on a taxi ride home to New Jersey.

Two weeks later, I found myself travelling to New Jersey as well, flying into into Newark airport with only two other passengers on board. What chance was there of another terrorist attack, we wondered silently, even as President Bush was pleading with Americans to return to business as usual while issuing warnings that there may be more terror to come. Some New Yorkers were so spooked that they sold their apartments and moved to Texas.

America was confused, and the rest of the world looked on bewildered as the spoiled, overprotected society that qualifies as the biggest superpower of all time struggled to deal with the kind of tragedy that many others learned to cope with long ago.

Many of us born and raised outside North America felt that people here had been too insulated from the real world - which is not surprising, given that the American media tend to treat the rest of the world as a U.S. satellite operated by remote control. An event like 9/11 can't help but expose the media's pretension and self-obsession. "The world has changed," media pundits claimed after the carnage when, in fact, America had been forced to join the real world.

Of course, media everywhere are by definition self-serving. It takes great effort, imagination and courage to see the world as others do, just as it can take a cataclysmic event to expose our unconscious parochialism and double standards.

The U.S. problem is that the rest of the world now knows, if it didn't already, that America cares only for itself and will use its power to manipulate the world in its own image. That was clear enough when President Bush told his people that "they hate our freedoms" and then, speaking from the other side of his mouth, claimed that America has to do a better job of "telling them how good we are."

This duplicity sticks in the craw of those asked to support America's multilateral moral crusade against terrorism even as its President essentially gives the rest of the world the finger on climate change. The pragmatists among us can live with American double standards, some work around it and some even profit by it, but those who can't abide by this world order are determined to destroy God's own country by any means necessary.

And the cold, hard truth for Americans is that this is the prism through which the world's silent majority views them and the events of 9/11. For the billions who live below the poverty line in societies in which insecurity and violence are part of daily life, 9/11 gave Americans a taste of what it's like to be at the receiving end of arbitrary, unjust terrorism. Their confused and often hysterical response gave perverse pleasure to people who must deal with tragedy on a regular basis.

While Americans consoled themselves with sabre-rattling, record approval ratings for the President and scapegoating anyone who dared to suggest they might not be "with us," only by actually travelling outside North America could you begin to gauge how the rest of the world truly felt.

Visiting Europe last fall, I encountered spirited and public opposition that would have shocked most Americans. At some point, the saturation coverage triggered a backlash. People openly sneered at their self-absorption and dismissed the attacks on New York much as Americans themselves sometimes brush off the death toll in some distant place where they have poked their imperial nose. People couldn't escape the nagging suspicion that U.S. political interests were using the tragedy as cover.

And in Africa, 9/11 had as much impact as, say, that continent's recent famine has had in America, even though U.S. media (mostly CNN) are many Africans' only source of information about the outside world. But since most Africans have never been on a plane or even inside a building more than two storeys high, the events of 9/11 must have seemed like something out of Hollywood.

The truth is, for all the blanket coverage, for all the tragedy and sadness and for all the change that Sept. 11 may have brought to life in North America, in four-fifths of the world, everything looks much as it did last Sept. 10.