This and That

We stopped briefly along the roadside on our way home from the cousins' reunion so I could take a few photos of the landscape----very different from ours yet very beautiful that day. 

As Bill said, the sun and the sky make a dramatic difference to landscapes such as that above.  

On Sunday, the sun was doing its thing, creating interesting shadows and striking colors within the wide-open sagebrush flat lands and the rock hillsides near Dry Falls north of Ephrata. 

We moved on into the fall beauty of the wheat farms but did not stop for photos. 

It had been a great weekend----quality time spent with our friend Shiraz and the rest spent visiting with my cousins on the Brown side of the family.   

That group consists of the Browns (Mike, Kevin and me from Sandpoint), the Walthos (Loretta, Madalyn, Rita, Lauri, George and Carol from Ephrata) and the Skeltons (Mary, Eddie, Patti, Sue and Kenny from Pasco). 

As with every year of this event, some members were not able to attend, and we missed them. 

Still, we had a good time, reconnecting and catching up with the family members whom we've known since childhood.  

This year's conversations dealt a lot with medical problems.  Can ya tell we're getting up there in age?

It was also fun to see our cousin George's beautiful home and our cousin Loretta's home at Blue Lake, and, of course, the food was great too. 

As always, the weekend inspired many fun memories. When Monday morning came, however, it seemed difficult to spend much time savoring the good times after waking up to horrific news of yet another mass shooting in Las Vegas. 

Like many folks, once again stunned with the magnitude of the event,we followed the day's events with disgust and with the ever-present and mind-boggling curiosity as to the "why" this senseless, despicable act had happened. 

Sadly, we're becoming all too accustomed to the patterns of behavior that come after these massacres: lots of heroes emerging with first responders and everyday, ordinary citizens, administrators addressing the public, local politicians showing up to offer assistance and national politicians making statements similar to what they said the last time something similar happened. 

I noticed yesterday that some of the talking points from national politicians have changed:  of course, on one side, suggesting that the automatic weapons played no role in this slaughter, just a deranged mind, while on the other side: prayers are nice but action is needed.  

Seems like both sides have come up with a new twist for how to react with publicly and with a unified voice to "the raging elephant in the room."  

Will anything good come of the massacre in Las Vegas?  We've already seen and heard about a lot of good in respect to the endless stories of people helping people survive or to escape.  

We've heard how the community has come together with blood drives and with providing accommodations for family members coming to deal with their losses or with their injured loved ones.

Sadly, it's all good for a very very bad reason.  In the end, 59 innocent people are dead, hundreds of the living and their families will never be the same, and our society will deal with even more obstructions to our freedoms in the name of keeping us safe. 

It's a sad commentary on several levels, especially because we seem to have reached a point in our country where everyone seems to take rigid sides with little or no desire to come together and to reach a compromise on constructive ideas that could change the destructive patterns which are sadly becoming the norm in this country.  

The question today, besides why this slaughter happened, is will the pattern with which we've become all too familiar, ever change?

I hope so.