It is almost poetic, in a dark, 'I told you so' kind of way. We live in an era where we can beam garbage television into our pockets via invisible waves, yet we cannot seem to master the ancient Roman art of stacking rocks so they don’t crush the peasantry. A commuter train near Barcelona became the latest canvas for this masterpiece of municipal neglect when a retaining wall—a structure whose singular job is to sit still—decided to participate in the regional pastime of falling apart. One person is dead, at least fourteen are injured, and a few hundred more are currently stuck in the existential realization that their daily commute is essentially a game of Russian Roulette played with a budget-constrained civil engineering department holding the gun.

The facts are as dry as the crumbling mortar that caused the disaster. On a Tuesday morning, while the rest of the world was busy pretending to work, a retaining wall near Vacarisses gave up the ghost. It didn’t just fail; it resigned. It looked at the state of the Iberian Peninsula, saw the petty, performative squabbles between the central government in Madrid and the separatist theater in Barcelona, and decided that being a wall was no longer worth the effort. Heavy rains were blamed, of course. In the lexicon of modern bureaucracy, ‘weather’ is the perfect scapegoat. It’s an ‘Act of God,’ which conveniently absolves the ‘Acts of Men’—specifically the men who haven’t checked the structural integrity of a hillside since the late twentieth century.

Let’s talk about the ‘modern’ European infrastructure, shall we? We are told, with a straight face, that we live in the pinnacle of human civilization. We have high-speed rails, integrated transit systems, and enough red tape to wrap around the moon twice. Yet, the foundational reality is that the entire system is rotting from the inside out. The Spanish regional authorities will now engage in their favorite ritual: the post-tragedy investigation. This is a secular religious ceremony where highly-paid officials in expensive suits stand around a pile of rubble, looking somber for the cameras, and promise to find the ‘root cause.’ I can save them the taxpayer money right now: the root cause is that you haven’t spent a dime on actual maintenance because maintenance doesn’t win elections. Maintenance isn’t a shiny new stadium or a performative speech about Catalan identity. Maintenance is boring, invisible, and essential—which makes it the first thing to be sacrificed at the altar of political posturing.

While Madrid and Barcelona play their endless game of constitutional chicken, the people actually living there are literally being crushed by the neglect. One dead, fourteen injured. To the bureaucrats, these are just variables in a risk-assessment spreadsheet. If the cost of fixing every retaining wall in the country is higher than the projected legal settlements for a few dead commuters, the wall stays broken. It is the cold, hard logic of the neoliberal state. They don’t see a tragedy; they see an actuarial event. They will offer ‘thoughts and prayers,’ which is the political equivalent of giving a drowning man a lecture on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen.

There is a profound irony in the ‘commuter’ existence. These are people who have sold their lives to the clock, traveling from one box to another box in a third box on rails, all to sustain a system that can’t even keep a wall from falling on their heads. The train crash at Vacarisses is a microcosm of the Western condition: we are all on a track, moving toward a destination we don’t really want to reach, while the very earth we’ve tried to pave over is slowly reclaiming its right to move. The earth doesn’t care about your transit schedules. It doesn’t care about the ‘Generalitat’ or the ‘Spanish Constitution.’ It only cares about gravity and erosion.

In the coming weeks, expect the usual finger-pointing. The central government will blame regional maintenance; the regional government will blame central funding. They will bark at each other across the aisle while the families of the victims are left to wonder why their loved ones were killed by a landslide in a country that supposedly has its act together. But don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll install a very nice commemorative plaque near the site of the wreckage. It’s much cheaper than actually fixing the hillsides, and it provides a lovely backdrop for the next politician who needs to look like they give a damn. Until the next wall falls, of course. But by then, we’ll all be distracted by something else, like a celebrity’s tax returns or a new brand of flavored water. The cycle of stupidity is the only thing in this world that runs on time.