As the United Nations prepares to send troops under Australian command to East Timor this week, hopes for a return to law and order swell. But the images of corpses surrounded in pools of their own blood will continue to be remembered long after the gunfire cease, just as Monday’s horrific quake in Taiwan will. Already, critics have begun to question who was to blame.

Such events, while of momentous proportions, have not recieved as much coverage here as, say, Bill Lana Lee’s stalled nomination. That has brought criticism from those who believe covering Asia whould be our mandate, given that we have “Asian” in our name.

While issues such as these - or Chinese diplomacy or Japanese trade talks or Korean student unrest - are important, they cannot be our first priority, which is to cover those issues that draw us together as Asian Americans. As Asian Law Caucus attorney Victor Hwang reflected, “It tends to confuse the problem as to what are Asian issues and what are Asian American issues. We have to be very careful.”

Many Asian Americans are keenly interested in the doings of Asia, just as many other Americans are, so we do include some Asia-based news. But Asian Americans can be regarded as more Asian than American. As a result, a non-Asian American can easily misinterpret a Korean issue, for example, with a Korean American one.

Does the threat of ballistic missile tests in North Korea affect Asian Americans more than others? Only if the North Koreans pledge to target them specifically.

Likewise, the events in East Timor are most salient to those Asian Americans directly involved. While the recent deaths of thousands of Timorese and the displacement of hundreds if thousands of them is abominable, it does not involve the vast majority of us any more than atrocities in former Soviet Russia or in the Middle East.

Naturally Asian Americans are horrified at the carnage in East Timor, but no one must expect them to be more involved than Americans of non-Asian descent. Such an expectation would only contribute to the stereotype of Asian Americans as somehow being more foreign and less American.

Stop the Shootings

Once again another madman has ravaged a helpless group of young people, this time as they were worshipping inside a church. Last week, Larry Gene Ashbrook killed three teenagers and four adults in Texas during a religious singing service.

Such violence - which brings to mind this summer’s slaying of Won-Joon Yoon at church and the Granada Hills shootings, reminds one of some of the casualties of the 1960’ civil rights movement, in which churches full of children were firebombed and razed. At that time, the country was in the throes of an anti-equality infection.

But in the new wave of homicidal insanity the setting is not an old segregationist enclave, separated by ethnic barbed wire. This time, the setting is in largely homogeneous, unassuming small towns -- the kinds of places where people from big cities flee in order to escape urban incivility.

But unlike the past, the disease of one-sided violence is not concentrated in mobs. It is diffuse and festering in the hearts and minds of a scattered legion of them who are growing increasingly alienated. Mor are non-whites unaffected. The shooting on Sept. 14 (just the day before the Texas tragedy) of three hospital workers by the hands of middle-aged Vietnamese American Dung Trihn demonstrates that this alienation cuts across racial lines, too.

No one should write off suburban shootings as the result of an ammunition-fed malaise, limited exclusively to spoiled WASPs. Indeed, the incident in Anaheim suggests otherwise.

The nature of the pattern of shootings reveals the common characteristic of an extreme reaction to powerlessness. In these times of unparalleled prosperity, the existence of this insidious disease so far has gone ignored and untreated -- and that cannot continue.