I'm safe because it's happening an hour and a half away, but on Wednesday night I went to a concert where an active shooter is shooting up a synagogue right now.  He killed 8 people.

It reminds me again, as did the pipe bombs this week in the States, of when normal life was interrupted for me on a Saturday with my buddies when I was an 11 year old kid in Uruguay as we were going to go bowling.  Two blocks away from the bowling alley, it went up in an explosion from a bomb placed by Tupamaro terrorists. 

The bombing was meant to be a statement against US imperialism, since bowling is a North American sport.  Ironically, the only person to die in the bombing was a member of the proletariat, the janitor.  He was pinned in the wreckage as he agonized toward his death for hours.  We kids got to hear his screams.

It was my second such experience in two years in Uruguay's Tupamaro War, the first being when my family's car was bombed with us in it when we were going out for ice cream when I was 9 years old.  My head snapped back and hit the car's metal frame so hard that I still have a dent creasing the back of my skull bone.

Going bowling, going out for ice cream, these things were interrupted for me by traumatic violence.  Now seeing these folks in Pittsbugth getting shot going to worship services on a Saturday in a place where I was just this past Wednesday triggers those memories.

Whatever traumatic violence it is, whether bombings and shootings or sexual assaults or car wrecks, it always pierces right through a peaceful day with shock, tragedy, grief, and pain, doesn't it?