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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, of course, and for the loss of life,

and for the sheer disorder that had been unleashed in our world.

But as the days and weeks and months were on, I became especially angry over how confused

and 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,

and those who saw our enemy clearly were often driven by their own dogmatic religious beliefs.

In my experience, the only people in the US 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. It strikes me as a very apt phrase to describe how I felt on that day,

and really, ever since, more or less from the moment that the second plane united flight 175

...