Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they all stink.
After reading some blog entries recently, I felt provoked to write my own piece about this topic. First and foremost, I have been to too many years of higher education in fields that are all about qualification. Law, accounting, and science all have trained my wee little brain to realize that there are more questions than answers. So what do i do? Well I qualify things. If this then that but if the other then something else....you get the drift.
So, after reading these opinion pieces on opinions, I thought I would proffer my opinion on opinions. In making this exhaustive academic study, the first thing that popped into my head was the above statement. And, after further thought, I offer the following reivision.
Opinions are like assholes, everyone hides theirs and tries to keep it as clean as possible as not to offend others.
And I beleive on further reflection, people are afraid to have opinions at the risk that conflict will foreclose opportunity. Hence, at office lunches and civic functions, we either sit with people we suspect are most like us or we just sit there and limit discussion to subjects everyone can agree on. Even our lawmakers do this. With the political add season coming, I ask you to slow the dvr down and actually watch some of these commercials. "Mark Taylor is tough on crime." "Sonny helped the children." Why did the do these things? I bet it has less to do with their love for the little ones or the fact criminals are bad people than it has to do with the ease in which they can get people to agree on their legislation. Who wants to go home and say they voted not to punish the sex offenders? NOBODY.
People just don't stand up and say what they think anymore. We are all so interconnected and so many times are our thoughts we think private recorded in places we don't know about, that we are afraid to say what we think.
On another tangent, maybe people don't want to be called a liar or go back on their word, so they qualify. That keeps things from biting them in the ass. Or so they think. But hey, if you making any mistakes, you're probably not learning much.
So, there you go. That's my opinion, on opinions.
2 comments:
I guess the higher education is in part where my qualification tendencies come from, as well. But more often than not, my point in "qualifying" is not so much to preface my answer, but to frame the question. It's not that I don't want people to throw what I say back in my face, I just don't like being told "well, when I asked you this, you said that . . . " when in reality that is not what I was asked. I like to be clear about what it is that I'm saying; and the best place to start is to be clear about what's being asked. This may go back to the age-old lawyering truth that he who frames the question wins the argument; but rhetoric aside, I do in fact have opinions, though I note you have a valid point in that I do not regularly air them with much grandeur about the office lunch and the country club.
My $.02.
I agree with you Ivy.
I've found that I have a harder time conveying my opinions via e-mail and blogs though--it seems like in these forms of communication it's so easy to be misunderstood. But why are we so afraid of being misunderstood? I hate that we seem to avoid discussing anything of importance because we're afraid of being perceived as politically incorrect or offensive. I like to think that I don't avoid talking about much though (and I still have a job:)
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