THE THREE-MINUTE silence in tribute to the tsunami victims has ended. Over here, only public-owned TV networks have followed it (at national, regional and local level). Private networks (also at national, regional and local level) have been with their regular programming.

On the radio, only Catalan public radio was silent. All others were broadcasting as usual. Now they're doing a brief roundup of the country, and apparently they're saying that in Madrid the repercusion was unnoticeable. Same here in Barcelona: as far as I'm seing from my window (I live in an apartment at a busy avenue, with lots of traffic and pedestrians) I couldn't notice any change.

I remember back in the past, after some terrorist attack -presumably by ETA- how all traffic stopped, with all cars with their engines off and people standing outside their cars, offices and homes. And I remember the huge demonstrations after March 11. Of course, arguably the popular response to a terrorist attack and a natural disaster cannot be exactly compared, since in the latter case there's no moral agent and therefore no moral choice.

But I'd still would have expected a bigger repercusion of these three minutes. I'll be charitable and say that perhaps it's because there was so little time to disseminate the initiative, since it was only announced yesterday evening, after all.