Length
16 minutes
Words per minute
138.16
Word count
2,241
Sentence count
134
Harmful content
Toxicity
4
sentences flagged
Hate speech
3
sentences flagged
Anyone over 40 probably has very vivid memories of September 11th, 2001. I certainly do. I can remember how angry I was in those first few days, or months, really. I was angry over the event itself, and for the loss of life, and the sheer disorder that had been unleashed in our world. But as the days and weeks and months wore on, I became especially angry over how confused, otherwise sane and well-educated people were about the threat we now faced. What I saw all around me was a kind of implosion of moral intelligence. In my experience, the only people in the U.S. who could be counted upon to understand what we faced were fundamentalist Christians, which gave me very little basis for hope that we would play our cards right. As many will remember, the sky on the east coast on 9/11 was unusually beautiful. It was a condition that's apparently described as severe clear by pilots. Most of us had never heard that phrase until after it was used on 9-11 to describe the unlimited visibility of that morning. And that doesn't actually surprise me. There were 17 minutes between Flight 11 hitting the north tower and Flight 175 hitting the south. So there was 17 minutes to live with the illusion that we were witnessing a tragic accident, and its horrible aftermath. And in those 17 minutes, it is hard to think clearly. no question, no one could have known this at the time, but I don't actually remember what I was thinking at the moment, and that doesn t actually happened. I remember the difference between the first plane hitting the North Tower and the second one hitting the South Tower. I don t actually remember that at all. But in the moment that day, it was possible to imagine that what had happened at the north Tower. And that s a very apt phrase to describe how I felt on that morning, and really ever since, more or less from that moment forward, I have been unusually alert to the power of bad ideas and the horrible aftermath of that day. Sam Harris the moment I was able to live up to what I felt that day a day that I remember what happened that day as a day, and how I think about it, and how I feel about it now, and what it was like to be a witness to it why it was a day like that, and why it s so important to be alert to it, and how it really happened.
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