Spanish views from a small town

Poverty. Despair. Hatred. That is how extremism comes into existence. From poverty to despair to hatred. And, ultimately, action upon that hatred. It has come to light that one of the idiot terrorists that commited those acts of hatred in Paris was born in Paris 29 years ago. He had been accused of many petty crimes but never jailed. He grew up in one of the banlieues of Paris, where poverty amongst immigrants is the norm. He had left France to return to Algiers, the origin of his family, and was assumed to have fallen into the trap of radicalized hatred. Hatred toward a system that had created his poverty and from thence despair. The one thing that might have mitigated it was missing - a good education. It's the usual problem. Every child should have access to a good, free public education which teaches him to think and learn, and eventually to find the learning necessary to acquire a decent job somewhere. But, during times of economic downturns, one of the first budgets cut is ...

Imagine you have decided to go out for dinner, with your family or with your partner. You're at a restaurant, calmly eating something different, chatting about things you usually don't chat about at home. You're enjoying yourselves. From afar you hear pops that sound like a car backfiring. They get closer, and suddenly the windows shatter. People scream and dive to the floor. You pull your loved ones down and they pull you down, too. The pops disappear but the screaming and shouting don't. People are lying in pools of blood. Those who aren't hurt start to get up and look for help. Others try to help those lying on the ground. All around you the only question you hear is, "Why?" Why would someone simply shoot to kill? There are killings with reasons you can understand behind them. A drive-by shooting against rival gang members. A shooting of someone who double-crossed a drug dealer. A mob-land shooting that gets rid of rival extortioners. However vile tho...

If the streets of old Boston are rumored to have been laid out by cows, then our roads here were laid out by oxen. Thanks to the hilliness of the area, a road here never goes in a straight line for more than a kilometer. The road which goes around the peninsula of the Barbanza in western Galicia hugs the coast. The coast is an accidental coast worse than a granola bar; you don't know what you're going to bite into next, just like you don't know where the sea will bite into land next. Therefore there are curves where you end up thinking you've just changed directions and are going back where you came from. That is most noticeable on a sunny day when, from having the sun at your back, it's suddenly blinding you. At a crossing near Rianxo. The tarmac road that goes from Padron to Ribeira was originally laid out in the middle of the nineteenth century. Though it took its own sweet time, like most civil constructions around here. They began in 1864 in Padron and en...

From the city of A Coruña to the Cabo Vilán is a ruggedly beautiful coast of long, lovely beaches, and cliffs that fall straight down to the waves. It's a lonely coast, though. Only the beaches are frequented. There are few villages and towns right on the coast. Especially after Laxe heading west. There the coast becomes more accidental and there are few places where boats can take shelter in a storm. The only towns on the coast there, Camelle, Arou, and Santa Mariña, are in sheltered coves where small boats could be brought ashore, or where a sea wall could be built to further shelter the cove. From Santa Mariña to Cabo Vilán, and down around the corner of the map to Camariñas there are no settlements. The coast was too rough for our ancestors to even think about it. Upon that coast the storms from the Atlantic have always battered their hardest and has made it difficult for fishermen to ply their trade. That is the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death. The entire Costa da Morte a...

When I was growing up in Boston I remember that my mother was an avid coupon user. If she found a coupon and recognized the product, she would cut it out and take it with her on the next Saturday we went shopping. If there was no picture, she would ask me if it was something we used. (She barely spoke English and could only understand a very limited amount of written English.) There was a time when we had maybe six or seven boxes of detergent next to our washing machine in the basement. We used the expensive detergent, ever since my mother had been tempted to use one of the cheapest on the market and I had gotten a rash every day when my skin touched clean clothes. She justified buying the detergent whenever it was on sale (and better with an added coupon) by saying that we wouldn't need to buy it at full price if we ran out of it. A penny saved was a penny earned.  For years afterwards I thought she had been exaggerating a bit. Until I started doing the same thing. It began with...

Yesterday there was another protest in Madrid. They've become quite common lately, despite the new law trying to limit their number and intensity. But this one was very numerous. People from all over the country attended, travelling in chartered buses and private cars. Over twenty thousand arrived to join local protestors. There are no official numbers on the total of protestors, but by the time the protest reached its final stop in Plaza de España, people stretched out all along the route it had followed from its beginning in Plaza de Atocha, quite a long walk. In Spain the different demands have different colors. Protests about education are green, protests about health care are white. Yesterday's protest was purple, against gender violence, aggressions against women.  The objective of the protest was to awaken the public from its lethargy by pointing out that violence against women is growing again in Spain. And this government, unlike the last that passed laws protectin...