There is something poetically redundant about a retaining wall that ceases to retain. It is the architectural equivalent of a politician’s promise: sturdy in appearance, expensive in its tax-funded conception, and utterly prone to gravity the moment it is actually required to do its one and only job. Near Barcelona, a commuter train met such a wall this Tuesday, turning a routine transit into a kinetic experiment in civil engineering failure. The driver is dead, nearly forty others are currently being processed through the medical system, and the Spanish government has reached for its only reliable tool: the three-day mourning period. Because when you cannot manage a railway, you can at least manage a funeral.

This isn't an isolated splash of incompetence, though the media treats it with the wide-eyed shock of a goldfish seeing a plastic castle for the first time. Just two days prior, in Andalucía, the universe decided that one train disaster wasn't enough to humble the Spanish state. Two high-speed trains collided, leaving at least 42 corpses and a field of twisted metal as a monument to the hubris of modern transit. High-speed rail—the golden calf of the modern European bureaucrat—is the dream of whisking the bored masses from one identical tapas bar to another at three hundred kilometers per hour. It is predicated on the hilarious assumption that the humans running the system are smarter than the machines they operate. They aren't. They never have been. We are simply monkeys with better lubricants and faster ways to die.

The Left will, with the predictability of a metronome, scream for 'infrastructure investment.' They speak of billions as if pouring more digital currency into a bottomless pit of bureaucratic graft will somehow make concrete less susceptible to the laws of physics. They want 'socially conscious transit,' which apparently means transit that kills you with a more diverse board of directors and a carbon-neutral footprint. They view every tragedy as a budget line item waiting to be filled. On the other side, the Right will mumble about privatization and efficiency, as if the profit motive is the magical cure for a mudslide. They want the trains to run on time so the shareholders can extract their pound of flesh before the impact. Both sides are essentially arguing over who gets to hold the gold-plated shovel while the tracks are buried in debris. Neither side cares about the driver; he’s just a statistic used to justify a shift in the ministerial cabinet.

The concept of a 'collapsed retaining wall' is the perfect metaphor for our crumbling civilization. We build things to keep the chaos out—walls, laws, borders, safety protocols—and then we act shocked when the chaos realizes that gravity is a constant and human attention spans are not. We live in an era where we can track a package of artisanal beard oil in real-time but cannot seemingly prevent two multi-ton steel tubes from slamming into each other on a fixed, pre-determined path. It takes a special kind of genius to fail at a task where the vehicles are literally attached to the ground by steel rails. It requires a systemic, dedicated commitment to neglect.

And then comes the 'Mourning.' Ah, the three days of performative sorrow. This is the state’s favorite escape hatch. By declaring a period of national grief, the government transforms its own logistical and structural failures into a spiritual event. They aren't apologizing for the lack of maintenance or the systemic rot; they are inviting you to cry with them. It’s a brilliant PR move. You can’t criticize a grieving person, can you? To ask questions about signal failure or geological surveys during the Three Days of Sadness is considered 'insensitive' or 'political.' It’s the ultimate bureaucratic invisibility cloak. The flags fly at half-mast to hide the fact that the tracks are at half-capacity.

The driver in Barcelona didn't die because of a cosmic tragedy; he died because of a budget cut, or a missed inspection, or the simple, undeniable fact that we are trying to run 21st-century dreams on 19th-century bones. We want the speed, we want the convenience, but we lack the collective intelligence to maintain the basic requirements of staying alive while moving. We are chasing the horizon while the ground dissolves beneath us. In the end, the trains will be repaired, the tracks will be cleared of the blood and the ballast, and the next batch of commuters will climb aboard, clutching their smartphones and their delusions of safety. The wall near Barcelona will be rebuilt, likely by the lowest bidder with the best political connections, and everyone will go back to pretending that the ground beneath us is solid. It isn't. The only thing truly high-speed in this world is the rate at which we forget our own lethal stupidity. Enjoy the ride, if you can. Just don't expect to arrive.