Comforted, they feel. That’s what they said, those children of devout dads shot dead in their Sikh house of worship. Comforted because their loved ones passed away "where God was near to accept them."

And you know, right up until those humbling statements at the hushed memorial service for Wisconsin’s murdered Sikh faithful, I was holding up pretty good.

Like all Portlanders, I’d carefully read six mornings of Oregonian stories; I’d quietly listened to six afternoons of OPB reports, about that mad man’s rampage. So I thought I had a pretty good grip on it. On that tragedy.

But when my eyes ran over that tripwire line: "where God was near to accept them" (reported by Dinesh Ramde of The Associated Press, August 10, 2012) — I lost it. My emotional management of it, of it all, evaporated like River Willamette’s morning mist.

I fell apart. Very early Sunday. In a very public place. My usual window table, inside RiverPlace Hotel’s tidy dining room. Very messy.

Overwhelmed I was, by a wave of hot tears, a stream of snot. That considerate waitress cut me 30 minutes of slack. To let me get over it.

"Terima kasih, anak," I told her in Bahasa, when she finally refilled my coffee cup.

She looked at me, question marks for eyebrows.

"Oh. Ma’af ma’af ..." I started to say, but quickly corrected myself. Right expression, wrong language. It happens to us sojourners. We get lost. We pause and park in mistaken lots. Other places and other times get ahold of us. And it takes a few minutes to recover yourself. To get your American wheels back under you, so to speak.

What grounds us

Maybe you’ll give me another minute to explain.

It’s about those words of solace. I’ve heard them before, maybe you’ve heard them too, during other sudden and irreversible moments. Bad ones.

An ancient auntie, splotchy arms and tremory hands, said them to me when I was growing up in nascent Indonesia. It was the day after neighborhood Muslim boys nailed shut our town’s Christian church doors, lit hungry flames, and let no one escape.

We shared a front door stoop, this elder and me. Inside her boney arms she rocked me and reassured both of us with the same humbling expression. "God was near to receive their souls. Ampun’illaah." Oh Mercy, dear God.

Some years later, a young mullah, bad beard and crooked teeth, said those same words to me when I was studying in troubled Iran. It was the day after the Shah’s soldierboys fired a 50-caliber Browning point blank at young demonstrators. Those rounds exited those young bodies and went right through a mosque wall, straight into a community room crowded with those guys’ sisters, mothers, and wives.

He and I were sharing a curb, and my tomato and cucumber sandwich, when he said that. The memory’s seared into my frontal cortex.

Of course these redemptive words from a Sikh son or a Muslim brother or a Christian auntie, ease every soul’s suffering. We are spared from desperation by them. And the mystery of how this heals us, stays with you and me. But what remains of this 800-word essay is not about that.

I suggest we needn’t worry too much about those who’ve actually heard women in true terror, those of us who’ve smelled living bellies ripped wide, those who now and again get stalled for long moments in emotional parking lots. Off the humming highway. Suffering grounds us.

We need to talk about people who only hear radio news, only know printed reports, only experience digitized images. Those Portlanders both blessed and dimmed by their distance from really hard times and very bad places.

Thus protected, our mainstream has been freed to rush from buzz to buzz. The options are endless.

What disconnects us

Last Saturday, I followed four lanky teens into an eastside arcade. Once inside, each split off into a reality of his choosing. I watched one boy maim then murder several virtual adversaries with a variety of assault weapons slung from his imagined shoulders and hips. A small satisfied smile lifted the left corner of his lips.

Next, he accelerated to 100 mph on a Kawasaki superbike. Again lots of twisted, broken bones, and lots of pooled blood.

Then the next buzz. No pause. No parking lot. No sorting of the strong impressions just made on his young mind. No doubt each jolt had lost its power over frequent exposure.

This kid’s America made him hungry for stimulation, and at the same time, not really moved by it. This is bad. This boy is our future.

Our county’s mainstream is an accelerated work in progress, maintained by people working too fast, too hard, and way too long. By you and me. Democracy is our daily assent and participation in this crazy pace.

The scale of it is unprecedented. The speed of it is numbing. In the relatively short while our family has resided here, America has warred 14 times. Always far from here, always where someone else’s mom is working, her kids are studying, and their aunties are shopping.

I have to sit down in a quiet place, and take a careful minute, to actually recall each country our irresistible armies and air forces have crushed. I count them finger by finger, hand to hand. I cannot account for the people hurt or murdered or heartbroken. By you and me.

If only your smartphone knows for sure who we’ve invaded since President Johnson; if it takes a running tally to tell that vulnerable eastside teen how much harm he’s done; if I can’t remember how many Amish school girls, or how many Georgia Tech students, or how many Colorado movie-goers, left their families inconsolable when they left this life — then I’ll just as likely let slip the killing of those Sikh faithful in their suburban Wisconsin temple.

Networks’ news cycles every 24 hours.

Now’s a good time for all of us to stop. To pull up the parking brake and pause to do our accounting. The pain, I’ve been assured and reassured, is not as awful as the alternative. The numbing.

* * *

The Asian Reporter’s Expanding American Lexicon

Terima kasih, anak (Bahasa Indonesia): I offer our love, dear daughter. What we say when English speakers say thanks.

Ma’af ma’af (Bahasa): excuse me, excuse me.