Madrid March 11
I haven’t been able to access this log since Thursday due to a problem with my ISP. I have been stunned and shocked for the past few days but I’m getting over it now. I was very close. Here is what I wrote on Thursday afternoon.
What can I say? I take these trains every day. I am numbed by the familiarity of the pictures on the TV. The railway stations, the red and white Cercanias trains, the commuters; these are the backdrop to my daily routine. There but for the grace of God go I.
What hits me next is the randomness of it, the futility, the utter waste. There is no political gain of any sort to be had by this act. There is no strategy, there is no master plan, there is no justifiable and noble end to these means.
What hits me then is my own ambivalence to so-called ‘armed struggle’, especially in my own country. It is easy to point the finger at the stick-in-the-mud Unionists in Northern Ireland and say ‘why don’t you move on, let bygones be bygones for the sake of peace?’ from the comfort of an armchair in the south, safe in the knowledge that you can go shopping of a Saturday morning without the fear of being scraped piece-by-piece off the pavement a few hours later. Not so easy when death’s shadow comes hovering over your own front door. This morning we felt trapped in the city - paralysed, almost afraid to move. How would we feel if we had to endure that everyday?
Yes, we are right to encourage people to sit down and talk and look to the future. But we are wrong to attempt to lighten the sufferings of the past or attempt to sweep them under the carpet in our impatient rush to Utopia. We walk a fine line between bringing the outsiders in from the political wilderness and justifying their past atrocities. If you haven’t lived amidst a direct terrorist threat you cannot hope to understand how it can affect you. Yesterday I would have looked to Northern Ireland with disdain and frustration at their interminably slow progress to a settlement. Today I am again filled with admiration for those - from all sides - who have managed to come this far.
I am writing this in a park near the exhibition centre where they are bringing the bodies. All around me there are sirens blaring. There is a shortage of ambulances. Streams of hearses are passing by. There are appeals for blood donors and for motorists to stay off the roads. There are almost 200 dead. Four bombs in three stations. A fifth that didn’t go off. Crowded public spaces. Easy targets. Politically insignificant targets. Even ‘fellow travellers’ of terrorist organisations cannot justify something like this.
My mother phoned me this morning to see if I was OK. It took her a long time to get through due to the demands on the telephone network. God knows what she thought when the news came on the TV.
There is an eerie calm about. People are not sure what to make of this. They are caught between getting on with their daily routine and wondering if they should be doing something more - reacting somehow. But how? It’s as if a meteor fell from the sky. As random as that.
It changes nothing. It changes everything.
Mark Waters marked time at 6:13 pm on March 15th, 2004 .
