Black Stallions and Opinions

It was a very typical Sunday after a fantastic finals night.  The stall curtains were coming down and the excitement of the show was drawing to a close.  The night before was great as the best of the preliminary put on a show and now as the morning sun shed its light the dust was settled.  With the trailer, packed I headed over to the stalls of another trainer to pick up a horse I was hauling home for a friend.  After exchanging pleasantries I offered my condolences to the other trainer, who like myself, had some bad luck in the preliminary and missed the finals.  His sharp response caught me a bit off guard “he is not a very nice horse!”  As I took my friends horse to my trailer I looked into the stall of the beautiful black stallion the other trainer had referenced.  As I walked away I could not help but reflect on the horses record; he had won a major regional futurity, been an open futurity finalist, made the NRBC open finals the year before, and consistently marked very high scores, his lifetime earning had to be near 80,000 to a 100,000.  Sounds like a crappy horse.

For the past month this has been on my mind, what makes something good or great? For me the Black stallion is a fantastic horse; he has ability, looks, and a great show record.  Everything from the outside tells me he is not a good horse, he is a very good horse.  Yet to the one who rides him he is just the opposite, he is in deed not a good horse.  So what is something that consistently does its job and brings home a good paycheck if not good.  Could it be the Obama truth factor?

By the Obama truth factor I mean the Presidents idea that truth is relative to the perception of the individual.  He does not lie because from his perspective it’s true.  From my perspective the guy still smokes crack and is full of deceit and lies.  But given the perspective of the fore mentioned horse and my opinion of him and the opinion of the other trainer maybe the president is on to something, in his world that is.  This then leads to the question are statistics truth and goodness an opinion derived from the interpretation of the statistics?

Of course all this deep philosophical thinking over the response to a condolence comment really can be painful at times.  Then again trying to understand the split tongue of a politician can be as well.  So at the end of the thinking, I have decided that the black stallion is a good horse and that’s my opinion.  Our white president with an African heritage is a brilliant man who has a hard time accepting that the world is black and white in terms of what is in the end true.  Guess in the end you never know what can come from giving a ride home to a horse your friend purchased, hope he is a good one.