The coming regional elections in Cataluña, which have been posited as a de facto referendum on independence, send shivers through Spain's political body. Over the weekend, a former PM publishes an "Open Letter to the Catalans," and the nationally governing Popular Party present a last minute bill in Congress to reform the Constitutional Court, seeking to punish current, pro-independence Catalan leadership and potentially bar Artur Mas from office. Opposition parties across the political spectrum object to the move. Meanwhile, thousands of men, women and children risk their lives traveling under precarious conditions, on boats or in trucks, to reach some place where they may feel safe from bombs or attacks against them, their homes, their families. This chosen place is the European Union and it has declared the arrival of more than 310 thousand migrants so far this year to be a "crisis." The hungry, tired and frightened are met by more chaos here as infrastructure is lacking. Though the new arrivals account for a tiny fraction of the EU's population of more than 500 million, the political will and wherewithal to face these people escaping war and hardship have yet to be found.
