Your Opinion Matters- Except When It Doesn't

It seems to me that in modern times- the age of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, e mails, texting, etc. - we have lost all manners when it comes to expressing our opinions. That sentence in itself is a perfect example of one of my opinions. There is a common mistake casually being made millions of times a day by all of us keyboard assailants, thinking that our opinions are actually a mutual reality. We have a personal perspective of our world and how everything and everybody should look, act, and function, thereby forming our opinions. But where we run into trouble is when we either forget to consider, or completely disregard, that literally everyone has an opinion of their own. We develop a sense of bravado as we hide behind our devices. You know what they say about opinions and a**holes. We throw these stinky little illusions of our reality around like they are gospel, and anybody who isn’t riding on our band wagon is the perceived enemy. Sometimes we even gather our tribe of like-minded people, who validate these unsolicited and usually unkind “ideas”, and then we wield them like a literary sword, attempting to bully and cut down anything or anybody with an opposing view. Our ugly, small minded fireballs of verbs, adjectives, and nouns form nasty sentences, intent on offense. Then our “faux- foes” react in kind, fanning these flames into a completely unnecessary, pyrrhic fire fight! And we all think we are justified, even though these are, in fact, still our measly, messy, unnecessary opinions! That’s just full blown foolery on a disturbing, social media scale!

The “Truth” of the matter is, just because we have an opinion doesn’t mean that anybody wants, or needs to hear it. Most people value solid information, but will still ask for an opinion from time to time- like which color looks better on a wall, or how a new recipe tastes. So opinions do matter, when someone is asking! What makes us so compelled to blurt out everything we think or feel to an unseen media? They didn’t ask, and most likely couldn’t care less!! Just because we can doesn’t mean that we necessarily should speak our reality. We need to remember that our words have consequences, and that people, in part, form their opinions of who they think we are by how, when, and what we speak or write. Just because we feel or think a certain way about a topic doesn’t mean that we have license to spew it arbitrarily. Putting our enormous egos aside, shouldn’t we at least ponder whether our “Two cents” might in fact be nonsense?

But that’s just my opinion...

“Before you speak ask yourself if what you are going to say is true, is kind, is necessary, is helpful. If the answer is no, maybe what you are about to say should be left unsaid.”

~Bernard Meltzer