This summer, for the first time ever, I went to Europe. For one amazing month, I lived in Spain, admiring the culture, seeing the sights, taking classes and making friends. It was, overall, an incredible and unforgettable period of my life.
Looking back at that time now, when our nation is so disturbed and frightened by the actions of a single, malevolent group, it seems ironic that my trip began the same way.
The second day in Spain, my group started out on a day trip to Toledo. We left early, early enough that we should have been able to avoid traffic, and yet traffic was awful. It seemed like we would never get out of the city.
No one could figure out what was taking so long, until someone pointed out the window, at a huge, billowing cloud of smoke covering the horizon. Our guide called home and discovered that, yes, it had been a bomb, set by ETA, the Basque terrorist group. ETA's main problem is that while they consider themselves a free nation, they're still part of the Iberian Peninsula and still under the rule of the Spanish government.
Of course, the city of Madrid reacted quickly and sharply to capture the person responsible. Traffic was a nightmare that day because every single exit and entrance to the city was sealed and each vehicle was stopped and searched.
We found out later that the smoke was actually due to Madrid's large sports arena burning down, but that had by some odd twist of fate happened at the exact time that a bicycle bomb was set with the intention of taking out a Spanish general.
In that particular instance, they were successful and only the general was killed - not a civilian, luckily. Only a few bystanders were injured; the number dwindles in significance when compared to the recent events here, at home.
I had never had any experience with terrorism before. Never. And now it's happened here at home.
The relevance? It comes in the way those events were handled by the Spanish population. While I was in Spain, it unnerved me to see how casually the people accepted the news of terrorism and deaths. In the space of that single month, there were three different attacks by ETA. While my host family was always saddened to hear the news that more people had been injured or killed, for them, it wasn't an extraordinary occurrence. Once, while listening to the TV during lunch, we heard of another attack and other than a brief silence, it was not the cause of much excitement or fright.
I suppose that reaction is a way for people to cope with the knowledge that it can happen anywhere, anytime, and for absolutely no understandable reasons. It was still difficult for me to understand.
Now, though, it's easier. How could they accept it as everyday? Well, for the rest of the world, it's been a fact of existence for a long time. Until now, as Americans, we've been living under the umbrella of a supposedly faultless defense system, and we were lucky to have that illusion, even for a little while. We're still lucky, in a way, that the threat to our safety is not like the ETA threat and living next door.
Having lost that feeling of imperviousness, however, people are looking to find a way to rationalize the tragedy and make it fit into the pattern of their lives, and by dulling themselves to the shock and pain, it gets easier.
While I hope our nation never comes to accept terrorism as an everyday occurrence, it's a bit of a relief to know that it doesn't have to be a completely debilitating event.
If America were to bend or break under the stress of these attacks, we would be giving the people responsible the reaction they wanted. This, then, is our chance as a people to prove our united strength as a nation and our worth as a nation of the world.
