Responding to Terror

You know I still can't get the image out of my mind of the attacks on those trains in Madrid (search).

There are reports of cell phones ringing on the covered bodies of victims. Some 200 bodies, many eerily beeping away as, no doubt, frantic relatives wondered and prayed where their loved ones were.

The daycare worker repeatedly dialing a child's mother. The wife who called hundreds of times by her count to hear finally, her husband was indeed, among the dead.

Little more than four days after the terror, the hurt is still real, the pain is still raw, the anger is still palpable.

It is understandable for a people torched by terror to do anything in their power to avoid terror. To retrench and, in the case of the Spanish people, to re-do an entire government.

The temptation now is to retreat Perhaps they feel, if we lay low, the terrorists will lay off.

But terrorists, of course, do not lay off. They seize opportunities and victims where they can find them.

They've attacked French tankers and killed German journalists.

Their evil crosses all nationalities and all peoples.

Their scourge is indiscriminate and their cruelty indecipherable.

They hate for the sake of hating.

They kill for the sake of killing.

The Spanish on March 11. The Americans 911 days earlier.

The Indonesians and Malaysians and Australians all those days in between.

Cell phones will continue ringing on the bodies of those who cannot answer and whose loved ones still look for answers.

Then and now.

We desperately hope that by avoiding the tiger, we will dodge the tiger, realizing perhaps too late, that in so doing, we only end up in the belly of the tiger.

Watch Neil Cavuto's Common Sense weekdays at 4 p.m. ET on Your World with Cavuto.