After experiencing Madrid, Spain, I came to realize the Madrid Metro brings people together physically and mentally. Amid the shortage of physical space, there is an abundance of unfocused attention waiting to be grabbed by words or images, whether they come from another person, the metro newspaper or the metro TV. Through interactions, global or personal, the fragility of human relationships and the errors of our humanity become clear.
I entered the train car with an influx of a dozen people, all dressed in work attire'some in suits and coats, others in high heels and hose and some students in jeans and sweatshirts. At first I am only conscious that there is a crowd of others on the train with me and usually no one person sticks out until the sliding doors of the train seal the rectangular portal and the train exhales air in a loud sigh. Only then are the fast-paced commuters still, and the platform of the tiny train car becomes a microphone. A woman steps out to the middle of the car and begins a speech timed to the minutes in which the train travels from stop to stop.
'Se??ores y se??oras,' she literally chants her petition. 'I have no work and no milk for my baby. My baby is hungry. I need money to feed him.'
After these few sentences resonate in the silent car because not a soul talks over her voice, the woman slowly moves through the car, child in one arm, the other arm extended with her palm up. Usually one or two people on the train will give something. The rest of the people avoid eye contact, including myself.
Although I do not show outward signs of contact with this woman, mentally I am connected to her because I know she needs something, yet the only reason I hear her is because I am on a train with nowhere to go. I see a connection between the human interactions on this Spanish metro and the United States relationship with Afghanistan. We are listening to the needs of the people in Afghanistan and responding by giving $320 million of food and supplies because we have to, not just to show the goodness of America. The Sept. 11 assaults put us on the metro where we had to listen, where we had to pay attention not just to bin Laden, but to other victims of starvation who are suffering under civil war and the Taliban's leadership. Terrorism comes from this suffering. This kind of suffering leaves people with the choice of just dying from horrible living conditions after living in insecurity or dying trying to improve their lives. No matter how hard we may try to avoid other's suffering, their suffering will always affect us eventually. This is the fragility of our human relationships.
It is in our interests to pay attention to the suffering of others and to humble ourselves as a country, because in many instances we are the cause of suffering, whether we intend to be. We are a wealthy nation in a world where people are divided into those who have what they need to survive and those that do not. And the United States as a whole has much more than it needs to live a good life.
Insecurity leads to violence. To improve our world, we should try to create systems where no group of people feels insecure financially or physically, and bombing Afghanistan will not make this happen. It's a big goal but if we say it's impossible then it will be. I would rather try to reach it because little successes mean a lot. It means we care about where everyone is going. The train takes us to the same place.
