One person can stop the world

One day last June, an individual brandishing a knife on a Rodalies train on the R2 Nord line in Barcelona caused the line to remain interrupted in both directions for almost an hour.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
09 July 2022 Saturday 23:55
13 Reads
One person can stop the world

One day last June, an individual brandishing a knife on a Rodalies train on the R2 Nord line in Barcelona caused the line to remain interrupted in both directions for almost an hour. The unfortunate incident occurred around four in the afternoon and once the train stopped, the passengers who had been threatened by the attacker fled as best they could by jumping from the car. The individual was arrested by the Mossos.

Apart from the reasons that the aggressor would have for his behavior, this event, which fortunately did not produce victims, although it caused inconvenience for many and a good scare for a few, is indicative of how easy it is for the action of a single person to affect the lives of a lot of people and even the entire planet.

The war in Ukraine is the work of one man: Vladimir Putin. Its decision to invade a neighboring sovereign country is not only wreaking havoc in Ukraine and Russia itself, but has also unleashed a whole series of adverse effects on the world economy, as well as on the always tenuous geopolitical relations and, incidentally, is seriously affecting disastrously the supply and market of energy and fuels, as well as causing the displacement of millions of people from their homes or the very real threat of famine, especially in some African countries, because the export of millions of tons of wheat is paralyzed of Ukrainian ports such as Odessa. All this is the work of a single president, the little man in the Kremlin.

In March 2021, a huge container ship was stranded in the Suez Canal, causing a monumental maritime traffic jam for days. There were many industries that suddenly saw their production paralyzed due to lack of supply of components, which highlighted the alarming precariousness of the globalized world.

The origin of the coronavirus has been attributed to a bat that reportedly bit a man in a remote region of China. Well, or something like that. But such an inconspicuous event has claimed the lives of millions of people to date and has changed the habits of the entire world in the most diverse ways, something that was completely unimaginable just a couple of years ago.

The error in March in the vote in Congress for the PP deputy Alberto Casero facilitated the approval of the labor reform, which if it had not been approved, could have precipitated the fall of the Government. One man, one vote.

A jihadist lone wolf kills several people in Paris -or London, Boston or Rome- and thousands of police and military are mobilized to search for him by land, sea and air. All the forces of a powerful nation against a lone fanatical or perhaps deranged terrorist. And this has been the case especially since 9/11 when a handful of jihadists forever changed the course of history.

Now, a person's actions are not always negative, as Mrs. Rosa Parks, an African-American woman from Alabama, once demonstrated by refusing to get up from her seat on a bus reserved for whites. And the same can be said of the Buddha, Jesus Christ or Mohammed, or at least it will be so for her faithful.

It only takes one passenger to stand up at takeoff time for the plane to be grounded and a deployment of security forces is launched, which can easily end in the collapse of the airport in which it has occurred the incident, in addition to causing chaos in many others. An abandoned or forgotten bag in a terminal can cause a stampede of passengers towards the exits, in a desperate attempt to save themselves from a possible explosion.

With each passing day, the increasingly alarming precariousness of our system and of ourselves as individuals and members of a society in distress must become more evident. How wrong we were to believe ourselves oblivious to the evils that plague those millions of homeless people that we do not even want to see. Or also global warming and so many other calamities that await us just around the corner. And on top of that we swallow the crudest hoaxes of populists who only want to destroy us.

A single person can sink the world... or save it.