Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Thursday, July 7, 2005: No need to add excessive verbiage about the London mass-transit attacks. Suffice it to say that America shouldn’t forget the Madrid attacks, which have been scarcely mentioned in the news media today.
This sort of terrorism has an evening effect. Whether it is thousands killed in the U.S., hundreds in Madrid or dozens in London, the effect remains similar, making Westerners feel vulnerable, paranoid.
It is very late, and I won’t be talking about this to my wife until Friday. But in 1999 through mid-2001 she worked for a multinational corporation, spending weeks at a time in London, several times. (I spent the week of Thanksgiving 2000 with her there.) Her hotels generally were near the Kings Cross stop, and she’d take the tube daily from there to the financial district in east London, near the Tower of London. I rode with her. Both were sites of bombs. (My wife, working for another corporation in the 1980s, worked for a couple of weeks in the World Trade Center. This one’s also going to be tough on her. -30-
