if i only knew...

3 minutes silence

Today is a national holiday in Hungary, so the streets were earily quiet anyway, but the country joined the European continent's three minutes silence at noon to remember the victims of the Madrid terrorist attacks.

I was watching the TV when they announced the break and showed pictures from the attacks with no music or commentary. I channel surfed to see what the others were doing and ALL our channels joined in the remembrance. CNN and BBC were showing images from across Europe, people standing in silence. It was very moving.

After sept 11th, after the intitial shock, i came away with a greater fear of terrorism and feeling less secure anywhere in the world. I felt a bit more unfomfortable flying to North America this summer (my first trip after Sept 11th) than I did before, but I took great comfort in being a European citizen, and felt that Europe does provide a safe haven for us, because we are not direct aggressors in the eyes of terrorists.

Then, last week's Madrid bombings shattered that view completely. Of course, without the mindless aggressive politics of the US, Europe would have never achieved this kind of an enemy status in the eyes of Al Quaeda or whoever the terrorists are, but let's just skip that for now. The main point is that we lost that innocent European era forever. Yes, we had IRA, ETA and the other Euroterror, but those should not even be mentioned on the same page as you-know-who. It's a sad week for all of us, Europeans.