4th Horseman Alert: Hinkley Hi-jinks...

I was 11 years old in gym class when Mrs. Summerfield ran into the middle of our parachute romp and told us that President Reagan had been shot and rushed to the hospital. The blurry horrifying yet completely attention-harnessing power of the footage of the assault was on all of the recently-installed television monitors in the hallways and I can remember the silence of people with hands clinched to their lips -- waiting, pondering what would happen in the days to come.

Today, as I sat down to begin my own assault via blog on the last three weeks of my life, I saw on CNN.Com that John Hinkley Jr. will now be allowed unsupervised visits at his parents homes, along with other flexibilities because of his being apparently too insane to kill the President (he was found not guilty because of insanity).

Things like this really just make me feel like we're all being jerked around by the fact that personal responsibility has all but disappeared from our communities - I mean come on now: He tried to kill the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES in an attempt to capture the attention of a very young Jodie Foster!

Talk about insanity - I can vividly remember when the television series Greatest American Hero had to change the last name of the main character, Ralph Hinkley, to Hanley to help ensure that people didn't somehow associate the assassin with the dude dressing up in tights and saving people from wittily-written trouble.

Feel free to chime in - I'd really like to know what YOU think about things like this.