PERSPECTIVE ON THE HOME FRONT : Yellow Ribbons or Yellow Bunker? : To endure this war, we have to listen to our hearts and doubts instead of hiding behind jingoistic slogans.

At first they called it “euphoria,” this wild flowering of yellow on every lapel and mailbox in the land. After the frivolity and corruption of the 1980s, the ominous sense of slow decline, we had located the source of Evil in the world and pinpointed it geographically in one nation, one man, one well-appointed bunker. We had a great uplifting cause at last, uniting us in one vast web of yellow. Too bad, of course, that the very flower of American youth, down to the newlyweds and single moms, had to be offered up as sacrificial lambs. But Americans are a strong and noble people, our yellow ribbons say, and--yes!--Good must triumph over Evil.

So why, then, are the yellow ribbons beginning to look like a huge yellow streak down the backbone of America? A cartoonist shows a man leaving his shivering family in front of CNN. “I’m going out for milk,” he tells them, “Cover me.” A psychologist reports that those who watch the war too much are developing “sleeplessness, depression, a heightened sense of fear.” Even flag-wavers have been known to admit to a vague and formless dread that “something terrible is going to happen,” at any moment, anywhere.

We’re afraid of flying. Foreign travel now ranks with hang-gliding as a mission for the foolhardy. Even domestic flights to dull and non-strategic cities are sparsely populated. We’re afraid, too, of water, snapping up the bottled kind from South Carolina to Los Angeles. Some of us even fear the air around us, so that gas masks may soon be as hard to get as yellow ribbons have become.

And somewhere, of course, Abu Nidal, the kingpin of terrorists, must be laughing in delight to watch Americans cower before he’s had to lift one bloodstained finger.

We’re afraid of information. A recent Times Mirror poll found that 57% of Americans favor tighter military restrictions on the already thin and pap-like flow of coverage from the Gulf. Another 45% don’t like news from within Iraq, and poor Peter Arnett may well return home to lynch mobs if the bombs don’t get him first. Americans shouldn’t have to see or hear of the devastation worked by war, a radio talk-show host argued recently: Just because you eat breakfast sausage doesn’t mean you want to watch the pork go through the grinder.

We’re terrified of discussion or dissent. Just a few weeks ago Americans were almost evenly divided on the virtues of a war. Today, even some erstwhile doves heroically insist that criticizing the war, its conduct, its fluctuating aims, may well amount to treason. In contrast to the 1960s, peace demonstrators march these days in thickets of red, white and blue and proclaim their ardent love for every general and GI, but this doesn’t quell the outrage that they stir. “Support the troops,” urges an Ohio bumper sticker, “Stomp on a protester.” Try to engage a yellow-ribboned patriot in calm discussion, one citizen to another, and you get at best a stony silence, as in: How dare you rain on my parade!

And somewhere Saddam Hussein is chuckling, if he has playful turn of mind, to hear our claims to fight for “liberty” and see us crouching in our living rooms, hands over our ears, over our eyes, and mostly tightly across our mouths.

Blame the media, if you like, not for telling us too much but for making Saddam Hussein 100 feet tall, a “beast,” a “monster,” an Ubermensch, as our President tells us, far “worse than Hitler.” Our own propaganda has worked too well--on us. We’ve forgotten what we’re up against: a poor country, already demoralized by tyranny, drained by war and squeezed by sanctions. In our yellow-fevered minds, we’ve turned this tiny foe into a sorcerer out of the “Arabian Nights,” a bogyman capable of stalking all our airports, overhearing our every doubt, checking every tree and post for limp or fraying yellow ribbons.

Blame also our own attachment to this sudden and all-too-fragile patriotic high. We love the rush induced by drumbeats and suntanned men in desert cammies. “Denial” is the pop-psych term for this. If we fear the probing thought, the uncensored datum, it may be because we sense that our own resolve is ribbon-thin, that the doubts we had a month ago are still alive, underneath the yellow. Don’t make us think of the costs, we seem to say--the price of missiles compared to child care, the soldiers’ wives on welfare. Let us have our crusade!

Blame, finally, an unspeakable, creeping sense of guilt. If our troops have become the moral equivalent of the baby in the well, we know who put them there, and in what unseemly hurry. If we shrink in horror, thinly masked as outrage, from the scenes of Baghdad--the gutted air-raid shelter, the wounded children, the women shaking fists--we know who paid, with every tax dollar, for the bombs that rain down. And if we fear commuter flights and the water from our faucets, we know too, in some mystic way, that what goes around must also finally come around, to us.

Well, listen up, friends and fellow citizens. There never was a “lovely war,” only varying degrees of hell. We cannot demand great courage of our troops while we cringe under a tent of yellow. If we’re going to endure this war and come out somehow still intact, we’ll have to learn to keep our lives on keel and not shrink at every terrorist’s snarl.

Above all, we’ll have to learn to hear the sounds of war, which include not only the generals’ calm assertions but the chants of protesters and far-off children’s screams. We’ll have to listen to our own hearts and doubts, and think and learn, and find our way back out.

Ribbons are fine, of course, and may even help us cope. Only, please, let’s stop covering our nation in a coward’s color. The ribbons should be black.