In addition to the raw agony I feel about the 199 murders that took place in Madrid the other day, there’s the agonizing wait to find out how the people of Spain, and of Europe, will react. After the initial grief and shock subsides, will they wave the white flag, offer a mea culpa, wash their hands of the efforts to safeguard civilization against those who are engaged in the process of destroying it, and decide that the best response to being senselessly brutalized by nihilist sectarian murderers is to try to make themselves inoffensive to them, in hopes that this will be enough to persuade the killers to direct their sickness elsewhere? Or will they find renewed determination to condemn such acts and their perpetrators regardless of their so-called justifications, declare that deliberate murder of people whose only crime was going to work one morning is anathema to life as we know it, stand up against the notion that no one is innocent and that everyone is fair game for a murderous god to destroy, and take the fight to these enemies of liberalism and democracy and humankind without embarassment and without hesitation and without mercy? Whither Spain? Whither Europe?
Agonizing though this wait might be, one thing it will not be is long. Spanish elections are tomorrow.