Of muslims and men

Ok, this is not fresh news, but I haven´t had much time to blog about it, so...
A couple of weeks ago I read this news on BBC about the three muslims that were killed in North Carolina. The headline went something like "Three muslims killed in North Carolina". Other news websites had similar headlines too. The news talked about some three muslim students that had been killed, supposedly after a fight over a parking place, though there was a possibility that it would have been a hate crime.
Well, here is something that would not have annoyed me two years ago. Even more, I wouldn´t even have noticed it. But the headlines did say "Three muslims". "Three muslims", or "Three muslim students", or "Three young muslims", everywhere I checked. Also in the NY Times.
Quoting directly from the latter: "The victims’ families described it as a hate crime. The police said that the shooting appeared to have been motivated by “an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking,” but that they were investigating whether religious hatred had contributed to the killings."
So, as I was saying, two years ago I wouldn´t even have noticed they were saying "Three muslims", instead of "Three people". In Spain, for some reason, we always specify if the person we´re talking about is south american, or black, or asian (and actually, we use "chinese" for asian). But now it sounds weird to me. The headlines should have read three "people", and then the text should have mentioned that a hate crime was suspected because these three people happened to be muslims and the killer happened not to be. Otherwise, we´re making assumptions we shouldn´t make. We´re actually turning a crime into a hate crime.

Speaking about hate crimes... This whole thing is getting crazy. The day after the killings in France, I survived a fake bomb alert when I was trying to go back home after work. It was about 7pm and I took the Metro to Chamartín station, where I would transfer to the RENFE train. When I got to the station, they were shutting down all RENFE lines running to Atocha, which happens to be my last stop. They were announcing trains wouldn´t run because of government orders.
After the previous day events, people were nervous. Even I was nervous. Of course I imagined something like a bomb alert, and I didn´t want to stay in a big station like Chamartín. I thought of an alternative route to get home, but then they announced some Metro lines were being shut down too. Finally, I decided it would be easier to avoid the main train and metro lines, and go to my parents´ house instead. On my way, I got a message about the bomb alert in Nuevos Ministerios station, and I texted  my family not to go there.
At the end, of course, it was a fake alert. Someone had forgotten a package with the word "STORM" at the station. But I have to admit it, I was scared. And I felt stupid after.
The last few weeks, when I got off the train in Chamartín every morning, there were three cops at the entrance, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying a huge machine gun. Actually, I´m not sure if I can say "huge", because I don´t know how big a regular machine gun is, but it does look huge to me. The cops stood there and did nothing. Sometimes they took a few steps to the left, a few to the right... I wondered why they were there.
Last week the cops disappeared, and I wondered why they were gone.
And today, I saw four of them in Atocha station. Dispersed, this time. Standing with their vests and their machine guns and taking a few steps from time to time. And I wonder why they are here. They look pretty intimidating, sure, but they won´t stop me if I carry a bomb in my backpack. I could kill all these hundreds of little ants heading to work if I wanted to. And their sole presence there makes me feel insecure.

It would all be so much easier if we realized how unimportant it is whatever each one of us thinks comes after... We all are nothing but (bio)chemistry.