On the morning that MSU students watched airplanes flown by madmen topple the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, first blush was an ugly feeling.
One student watched the television, rolled into a stuffy Berkey Hall corridor and spoke, when all others were transfixed to the screen and sullenly silent.
"Well," that person said. "Afghanistan is a parking lot."
And sooner than later, Afghanistan was a parking lot. Television personalities went from chokingly emotional monologues on patriotism to crude jokes of Afghani living conditions within six weeks. On Sept. 11, 2001, we were angry at Middle Eastern terrorists before we knew for sure that Middle Eastern terrorists were actually responsible. We were right, our first blush was an ugly one, but the truth was inevitably reassuring.
Last Thursday, worldwide terror and senseless acts of violence in the name of a god, who unfortunately can't be reached for comment by newspapers, struck again. And again, history taught the victimized people to go with their first blush of who, exactly, was responsible for the twisted train metal and bloodied bodies in Madrid, Spain. Spanish leaders blamed a separatist group called ETA for the bloodshed, and they predictably denied involvement.
For a Spaniard, that makes a great deal of sense. The ETA is to Spain what the IRA is to Northern Ireland and what al-Qaida has become to America. In the tragic three-act drama of worldwide terrorism, the Iberian peninsula is not an exception. Act I - a random act of violence, Act II - the accusation and Act III - the denial.
Whether or not the ETA is responsible for last Thursday's bombings and the murder of 200-some people only guilty of riding a train, though, is now reduced to an afterthought. Stories have come forward establishing links from the blasts to al-Qaida and therefore to the image of Osama bin Laden orchestrating terror en masse from a cave in Pakistan.
American media consumers arguably couldn't care less now if the ETA really is responsible. The fact that this act of aggression could have been predicated in protest of Spain's backing of the United States' war on Iraq is plausible, yet lost. Who cares? If al-Qaida has ties, then the monsters who allegedly did this must be the same ones who sent America into a tailspin almost two and a half years ago.
Also while we were out, another U.S.-led search for Osama bin Laden commenced. If what happened in Spain on Thursday has any connection to the war in Iraq or the war still festering in Afghanistan, it's al-Qaida's alleged involvement in both and the peripheral belief that al-Qaida is responsible every time a bomb not labeled "U.S. Air Force" is detonated in the world.
If most Spaniards saw the news on Thursday or were unlucky enough to have made the news that day, odds are that their first blush of the perpetrators accused the ones they knew the best. Knee-jerk reaction says go with what is familiar.
No one actually knows who has blood on their hands except for the murderers themselves. The biggest mystery America needs to solve remains not who is actually responsible for any act of violence in the world, but why we believe it's all coming from the same place.
