1. mentor cana on March 13, 2004 10:33 AM writes...

One way of reading this is that in the case of Spain the people actualy are building the public opinion. In the US on the other side, the media were more active in the framing of the public opinion.

2. Peter Caputa on March 13, 2004 11:41 AM writes...

In the US, there were many vigils in town squares.. Certainly not the order of 11M. However, It is a bit of a dramatization that we all retreated to our living rooms. People express solidarity and grief in many ways. I do think it is awesome that Spaniards marched together in such large numbers. I couldn't begin to say how or why... Here are some quotes from Spaniards:

taken from:
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,8961621%255E401,00.html

The vast crowd chanted "Assassins" and "A people united will never be defeated".

Two-storey-tall black ribbons hung from shops and offices.

Marchers said they had come to pay their respects to those who lost their lives in the blasts.

"I am here for peace, I am here for the dead," said Rachel San Joseph.

"We needed to show them that we are here for them. But we are very angry."

3. Roger Benningfield on March 13, 2004 3:54 PM writes...

It could suggest a number of things, or none of them:

(1) That Spaniards are more unified and monocultural than the U.S.... Americans are so diverse and America so large that we need media to provide us with a sense of unity that would be otherwise difficult to generate. Example: without television, people in Mississippi would have been far less affected by 9/11. Culturally, Mississippi and New York are very, very different places. The media helped everyone feel like a New Yorker that day. For better or worse.

(2) That the U.S. is an inherently macho place. We do a good job with anger, love, and so on, but we're not big on sorrow, empathy, and emotional trauma. As a whole, we don't mourn... we identify problems (corrently or not) and set about Fixing Things. In short, America is from Mars, Spain is from Venus.

(3) That Americans aren't big on taking to the streets. We identify such behaviors with riots and political activism, two things for which the average citizen has little patience.

4. Mark Federman on March 14, 2004 6:29 PM writes...

Noted by Marshall McLuhan: "I had been pointing out … our unique North American pattern of going outside for privacy and inside for community, the reverse of all other cultures in the world..." (Letter to Edmund Carpenter, January 26, 1972, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 450)

Being a nation of "rugged individualists" spread across vast distances it wasn't until the spread of the mass media that the nation really came together from coast to coast. Throughout Europe, there was the tradition of "café society" and the market being as much a place of communication as commerce. Thus the actions of the respective publics to their respective tragedies are to go to their respective places of "public meeting."

Where are modern "town hall" meetings held in America these days? Why, on CNN, of course!

5. F. Randall Farmer on March 15, 2004 2:53 AM writes...

Some contributing factors:

Spain - 192,584 sq miles, with Madrid being nearly in the center of the country, less than 300 miles by train and/or car from most metropolitan areas. 10% of the country's population lives in Madrid proper, and perhaps 5-10% in the surrounding area.

United States - 3,537,441 sq miles, 18x larger a long flight from much of the country. Large numbers of people _did_ turn out in New York, specifically to help with the relief effort. There were makeshift memorials all across the country and the world. I suggest the using the internet archive for those who may have forgotten those days:

http://september11.archive.org/

Randy

6. Chris Sacca on March 15, 2004 10:53 AM writes...

Spontaneous, mass demonstration is, in my humble opinion, an enviable Spanish tradition. In 1996, while I lived in Madrid, ETA assassinated a professor right on one of the main university campuses. That murder of one person alone was enough to provoke over one million spontaneous marchers into the streets. A unified mass of people, driven by passion, representing the full demographic spectrum, leaves an unassailable impression on a young American.

That said, the Spanish do not reserve this tradition only for glum events. In that same year, Atletico Madrid won the Spanish Football Cup and, on the night they won, over a million people flooded into the streets to celebrate the victory.