This and that . . . . .

Someone asked to see a photo of Rambo. This is the big boy with my sister Barbara at the Regional Arabian Show in Yakima several years ago. He and Barbara had just won reserve champion show hack for Half Arabians. He won another reserve championship at that show. Then, he got kicked and fractured his forearm. That ended his bigtime show career, but he continued to wow his fans at a few local shows. Since then, he's been my pasture friend and reliable mount, no matter how blind he is now.

Lots to think about this morning, especially after yesterday's tragedy at Virginia Tech. One of my former students reported his upclose perspective on the event in this morning's paper. Andy Schaudt definitely used his Cedar Post skills in reporting what he was seeing outside his office window at the university where he works as an engineer.

"Stunning" seems to be the word that kept coming to mind as I watched the news yesterday. It seems that when reacting to events such as this, there is nothing wise to say. Later in the afternoon, I talked with a former student who works for one of our U.S. Senators; she said the gun control issue had once again surfaced in her office after the shootings. I still say that when someone decides to do harm, controlling everyone else's ability to have guns is not going to stop them. They will find a way.

Whenever this issue comes up, I always wonder why we don't enact a car-control bill. Let's limit access to cars. Seems to me a lot fewer people will die. Let's have fertilizer control. A lot fewer people would have died in the Oklahoma bombing had fertilizer freedom been abolished. Or, let's have jumbo jet control. We could have avoided thousands of deaths in 9-11. At the core of any of these horrible tragedies is a human being, who, for whatever reason, has gone out of control.

I was also stunningly amazed at the ravenous, ridiculous way the press hounds interrogated the officials at Virgina Tech, acting as if these individuals were supposed to have dotted every "i" and crossed every "t" in their investigation just minutes after the incident.

Has our instant-impact society gone so far as to expect neatly-packaged answers for why an event happened almost before it was completed? Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I believe the blame game, which inevitably these days seeks out whose heads need to roll, ought to sit tight and wait for the emotional aspects of this event to work themselves out.

The answers will come---and they should---when all the facts are put in place in a methodical, common-sense fashion. Possibly a few mistaken assumptions can be avoided if this investigation is given a few days rather than a few minutes or hours.

I guess I'm naive enough to think that the president of the university and his law officers deserved a bit more understanding and empathy yesterday from the press wolves with the magnitude of the issues they were dealing with. If we don't know until tomorrow why this horrific event happened, it's not going to change the shock and grief felt by students, their families and the whole nation.

I'm sure the hungry media wolves and armchair quarter-backing on this event will continue to dominate the air waves 24-7 with the same fervor as the regurgitation we witness of every minuscule tidbit associated with Anna Nicole Smith soap opera-----until the next wacko comes along, performs the unthinkable and sends the hounds on a new chase.

It would be refreshing to see a little more compassion and good old-fashioned patience on the part of all concerned when horrible, shocking events like this happen to good people and their grieving families. We can jump to the conclusions later when the well-researched facts support them and the emotional turmoil has some time to settle.