Charlottesvlle, and now Barcelona.
This is just not my week for old haunts.
I was born in Virginia, am there now. Barcelona was my home town for a while when I was a teenager. I still have friends there, speak Catalan, and still run down there once a month on the average. When I'm there, I'm at the Rambla for at least part of the day. This area is the beating heart of the Catalan identity. Not Spanish, specifically Catalan.
I have no idea what these bottom-dwellers-from-a-toxic-waste-dump think they're doing, trying to kill Catalans, who are among the most tolerant people of the Iberian peninsula. They have taken in immense numbers of people from Islamic countries, from Morocco to Pakistan. From the café waiters from North Africa to the Pakistanis hawking overpriced trinkets to tourists in the Plaça de la Catedral, I've never seen the local cops harass any of them. If Christians or Jews started doing this in Riyadh, Islamabad or Qom, we'd never hear the end of it, but of course, they don't.
I haven't yet talked to my friends there. The statistical chances of any of them having been in the wrong place at the wrong time is small, but already too big. It makes no difference if the perp is from Ohio or Morocco. The extremist religious right calls them heroes in both cases. This is a step and a half away from blowing up my wife in our back yard. Quelling the rage is becoming a challenge that is extremely difficult to master.
The driver of the van, you will notice, fled instead of facing his victims. How courageous. From Ohio, by any chance?
= new reply since forum marked as read
With his attention span, he would have forgotten it 30 seconds later.
My mom-in-law has all her marbles, and has LOTS of stories to tell. She was by far the youngest of the children in her family. She lost three brothers in the war, and clearly remembers having to dive into ditches while walking to school while avoiding British fighter-bombers on strafing runs. Unfortunately for her, she is starting to lose her vision, is down to maybe 20%, a tragedy for someone who used to read extensively.
The week seems to be ending on a positive note, with the far right being surrounded by about half the population of a hostile city that clearly is not buying what they're selling. Bannon's departure from Washington may just end being like Obi Wan Kenobi's "death" in the first Star Wars film--"cut me down and I'll just become more powerful than you ever imagined."
It is too soon to know what, if any, changes will come to Barcelona, but initial reactions I have had from my friends there indicate they are quickly returning to life as if it had never happened. No one has forgotten, of course, but there definitely seems to be an attitude of "we like our way of life, and you will not force us to change it." The fact that several bad guys, including (seemingly) the death van's driver, were killed, and others planning a bombing blew themselves up instead, give some hope that at least this cell is gone. There will be others, no one doubts that.
The tax thing is being studied by tax lawyers and German courts. We'll see, but the Nazis grabbed whatever those few of my distant relatives left in Central Europe in the 1930s had, and then killed them. The death penalty has been abolished in Germany in the meantime. I will not allow the confiscation of my retirement nest egg by the Nazis' descendants, a decision my wife fully understands. The Nazis drafted her father off his farm at age 17 and sent him home from Stalingrad a year later minus most of one leg. She has no patience for their mentality, either.
As an American citizen, I still vote in the USA, but my wife, who has voted SPD and/or Green all her life, finds herself in the awkward position of realizing that the most competent leader for Germany in the upcoming election is Angela Merkel, no matter what party she is from. My wife turned 65 this year, and her pension/social security of €900 (no, I didn't leave off a zero) a month doesn't exactly go far. "Ethnic Germans" coming in from Russia and Poland, speaking little to no German, sometimes get three or four times as much. In Germany, like in the USA, voters can split their ticket. She still votes SPD or Green on the local level, but she is tempted to vote for Merkel's party on the national level for the first time. The SPD is really run like an "old boys' club," and they always suppress their female talent. In Ingrid Mattäus-Meier, the SPD had a perfectly capable finance expert who should have been their chancellor candidate a couple of decades ago. She was really sharp, and I liked her plenty. But she was the wrong gender. Their current candidate for chancellor is a somewhat charismatic (for a change), but otherwise typical "there-for-life" bureaucrat who has never done a productive day's work in 30 years--a glorified paper pusher. Merkel has adopted a clever election strategy--she never mentions him or anything he says. He can't refute any of her criticism of him because she never has any. She's just acting like he isn't there. As a life-long bureaucrat, he might as well not be (see "France, Hollande"
. He has one slogan, "mehr Gerechtigkeit (more justice)," which usually means exactly nothing other than "trust us to spend money more wisely than you would." Germany already has a €40 billion budget surplus this year. The country is furiously debating what to do with it, but the bureaucrats are obviously more than willing to spend a good portion of it on themselves, as bureaucrats in Europe inevitably do.
Or so my mom always said. 
