1 week before San Juan/ 1 semana antes de San Juan

The Spanish festival San Juan is around the corner. Each year people of this country celebrate the shortest night of year, or the arrival of high summer in different ways. Famous east coast, like Barcelona, opens seaside for bonfires and fireworks, so it’s ideal to spend a short night and wait for a beautiful sunrise.

Yesterday in underground I spotted this advertisement of local metro/ railway services: NO PARA, NO PARA, NO PARA, means Nonstop, nonstop, nonstop. Since normally public transport runs overnight only on Saturdays and special events, this reminds people they will have same convenience to travel as they like this year on that magically fire-lighted night.

Well, the design of a subway train (Metro) and a long-distance train (Renfe) running on a Moebius Strip can be no simpler: (though a little bit horrible that they might crash), the idea that there is no end of their way comes out quite straight.

Yet I could not help thinking directly of the incident on San Juan last year: 13 young people were killed by a train roaring by Castelldefels. Actually I was just there on the beach of Castelldefels at the same time, and a friend by my side got a call from a friend of ours at first time when the accident happened. And then we were sorry for a moment and I totally forgot about this tragedy till the moment I saw the advertisement one year later.  

Then I commented this propaganda to some Spanish friends, trying to say that the slogan might be not that appropriate: NO PARA, could also mean: Don’t you stop. As local they are, one said that the accident happened because, of course, those victims should not have passed the railways on ground when the light was red, and they were not aware of that long-distance trains don't even stop at that station, which was the case that caused their death. Also, what happened afterwards, medical help and therapist for the conductors and victim’s families, are morally in good sense for them to recover. Same voice also had Spanish national news report like of EL PAIS, EL MUNDO and BBC in Spanish.

Yet, this NO PARA thing just caused me feel nervous: is it a State’s horror to innocent people, like ‘we are not going to stop the train, even if you are ahead, then you are surely dead’? This is just my thought about the ambiguity of the advertisement from a pragmatic perspective: considering the context that trains are fatal killing tool, why not make the good public transport service sound more gentle and smart?