Forty years from now....

we will maybe still be around to see the release of Jamal Zougam, Otman el Ghanoui, and Emilio Trashorras.

These men, along with 18 others, were convicted today in Spain for the Madrid terrorist attacks to the theoretical sentence of 43000 years, give or take. But it won't matter, because Spain has a policy of "maxing out" sentences at 40 years.

In forty years, there's a pretty fair chance that I'll be receiving Social Security, if it's still solvent. I'm fairly certain that the US and Europe will have similar safety standards for cars, and those cars will probably get a bit more mileage than they do now, but I don't think we know how they'll do that yet.

There are lots of things that we don't know about forty years from now. I hope that I'll have children, and maybe even a grandchild by then. In forty years, we will likely have medicines and cures beyond what we can even imagine now, but we don't really know. In forty years, people will still be using tobacco. But it might not be legal to do so outside a designated room in your own home. We don't really know.

But there is one thing we do know -- Jamal Zougam, Otman el Ghanoui, Emilio Trashorras, and 17 other men, and one woman, will feel the sunlight of Madrid on their worn faces.

Unfortunately, one-hundred and ninety-one people felt the equivalent of forty years of sunlight in an instant. One-hundred and ninety-one bodies burned on the eleventh of March 2004, and that doesn't even start to include the one thousand eight-hundred and forty-one people injured.

I thought about this for a bit. Forty years in prison for one-hundred and ninety-one people adds up to about 10 weeks per murder. I had a friend who spent six months there for driving drunk.

I wonder what the concept of "justice" will look like in Europe in forty years.