Nothing says 'modern civilization' quite like forty-two cooling corpses tangled in the wreckage of a high-speed vanity project. On Sunday, Spain’s much-vaunted railway system—that gleaming metal umbilical cord connecting a series of crumbling Mediterranean municipalities—reminded the world that physics remains remarkably indifferent to national prestige. At least forty-two people are dead, and the survivors are left clutching at the tattered remains of a societal contract that promised them safety in exchange for their taxes and their compliance. It is, quite frankly, an exhausting display of human fragility and bureaucratic incompetence that should surprise absolutely no one who has ever interacted with a government-managed schedule.

Enter Javier Garcia, a nurse and survivor who has become the unwilling spokesperson for the collective psyche of a nation that apparently views train travel as a sacred rite of passage. Garcia told the press that it will be 'difficult for Spaniards to overcome this trauma.' This is the sort of poignant, empty sentiment that journalists love because it requires no follow-up. Trauma is the modern world’s favorite currency, a convenient blanket we throw over the charred remains of our structural failures so we don’t have to look at the rust underneath. Garcia, a man whose profession involves witnessing the gruesome reality of biological expiration, is now tasked with articulating the shock of a country that forgot that hurling hundreds of tons of steel across the landscape at breakneck speeds carries a non-zero risk of catastrophic failure.

The train, we are told by those who fetishize infrastructure, is a 'symbol of mobility.' What a quaint, mid-century delusion. In the Spanish context, the high-speed rail network has always been more of a political totem than a practical utility—a way for various administrations to pretend they are bridging the gap between the 19th and 21st centuries while the 20th century rots in the basement. Mobility is the great lie of the neoliberal era; we are told we are going somewhere fast, when in reality, we are just vibrating in place while the scenery changes. When the symbol of that mobility becomes a mangled heap of scrap metal, the facade slips. The trauma Garcia speaks of isn't just about the loss of life—which is, predictably, a tragedy that will be milked for three weeks of televised mourning—but the realization that the 'mobility' they worshipped was always just a fragile bridge over a canyon of mediocrity.

Predictably, the political vultures are already circling the wreckage, looking for ways to turn forty-two deaths into a campaign slogan. The Left will inevitably use this to screech for more 'public investment,' as if throwing more taxpayer euros into the bottomless pit of state-run management will somehow bribe the laws of inertia into behaving. They will frame this as a failure of funding, ignoring the fact that the money usually ends up in the pockets of union bosses or disappears into the ether of 'feasibility studies.' On the other side, the Right will begin their practiced dance of 'efficiency' and 'privatization.' Their solution is always to replace the slow-motion decay of the state with the high-speed greed of a corporation that would happily replace the emergency brakes with a subscription service if it added three cents to the quarterly dividend. Both sides are equally allergic to the truth: that this disaster is the natural byproduct of a system that prioritizes optics over engineering.

We live in an age where we expect the machinery of the state to be infallible, yet we populate that state with people who couldn't navigate a child’s sandbox without a committee and a bribe. The Spaniards are traumatized because their 'symbol' failed them. They are shocked that the metal tubes they use to flee their boring lives for the weekend can also become their coffins. It is an intellectual laziness of the highest order to view this as an anomaly. If you build a society on the back of aging infrastructure, overseen by a rotating cast of careerists who wouldn't know a piston from a pimento, you are not 'traveling'; you are simply participating in a long-form lottery where the prize is not being one of the forty-two.

Javier Garcia’s trauma is real, but the national trauma is a performance. Spain will mourn, flags will fly at half-mast, and there will be an 'investigation' that will eventually conclude that 'mistakes were made' without actually naming the people who made them. Then, everyone will get back on the train, because they have nowhere else to go and no other way to get there. They will sit in their seats, staring at their phones, pretending that the iron path beneath them is a guarantee of progress rather than a one-way ticket to the inevitable. We are a species of amnesiacs, doomed to be 'traumatized' by the same foreseeable disasters every decade, forever surprised that the things we build eventually break, taking us down with them.