Having lived in Spain for a couple of years (returning to the USA in October, 2001), and falling in love with the people of that country, the recent news about the atrocities in Madrid moved me deeply. I wrote the following to a Spanish friend:

Having lived in Spain for a couple of years (returning to the USA in October, 2001), and falling in love with the people of that country, the recent news about the atrocities in Madrid moved me deeply. I wrote the following to a Spanish friend:

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Dear _____,

I hope that this great tragedy in Madrid has not touched you too closely. I remember so well your friendship and support, when I was in your country on September 11, 2001. I remember, too, how horrible I felt at the deaths of so many of my own countrymen. You must feel the same.

Please accept my heartfelt sympathies and know that you, and all of my Spanish friends, are in my prayers, and please relay this with my best wishes to all of those friends, and to any others who may be comforted to hear it.

With deepest sympathy, I am

Your friend,

Andy
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He wrote back:

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Dear Andy,

Thank you very much for your support. You have described very well our feelings at this moment.

Yesterday morning a journalist from Madrid came to our office to interview ____ and myself. She took the train at Atocha station at 7:00 h, just 30 minutes before the disaster. You can imagine how she felt during our meeting.

I am very proud to have friends like you.

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I've been struggling, as I often do at times like this, with my own feelings about this event and the people involved. When I think of the victims, I can only weep. I can clearly see the Atocha station in my mind, having been there when it was filled with people, going about their business. The Spanish are a gentle folk, really, perhaps because they have known such violence in their own past and grown weary of it. You can't talk to anyone in Spain who did not lose a relative - an uncle, a grandfather ... a grandmother - in that country's horrendous civil war. Anyway, gentility is the lasting impression I have of those folks.

And they love children. When my wife first arrived in Spain with our then four-year-old daughter, I had been there a while already. At a little restaurant where I had become known, the waiter, Tony, immediately fell in love with Brenna (little blond, blue-eyed beauty). He took her by the hand and left the restaurant. Dana (my wife and Mama Bear to Brenna) flipped out, but I didn't. Tony took Brenna down the street to a little shop and bought her a little toy and brought her back all smiles (with Dana watching from a distance). This is not unusual in Spain, and I never ever feared for my family there. I fear more now, in our "safe" Orange County home.

Where am I going? Maybe just to express my sense the awfulness of the atrocity in Madrid. Not that it would be any less awful if it happened to Germans or French or (again) Americans or anyone else, but because I "know" those folks in Spain, it seems all the worse. I think of them in their business and work attire (as they would be at that hour on those trains), men and women and a few children, torn into bloody parts by the actions of ...whomever.

And then I think of the nameless faceless perpetrators. ETA? Al Quaida? We don't know, yet, and may never. I would like to take the high road and say that I will chant and pray for them to find whatever it is that is lacking in their hearts that could enable them to perform such an act, but I can't do it. People who can do such a thing to innocents, and do it anonymously and from a distance, do not deserve to share the air on this planet. If I could snap my fingers and kill them all, I would do it.

So, I'm not enlightened yet.

I believe that people like that are not redeemable in this lifetime, or able to be rehabilitated. They have forfeited the right to have anyone try. I may be wrong, and I'll live with that. Perhaps in years to come I will develop the ability to feel compassion toward people like the murderers who did this thing, but not today. Today I believe that it is in the best interests of you and me and all decent people to have such indecency removed from this saha world, and if that were my call to make, today, they would die, today.