Opinions are like A**holes

I woke up this morning with the title of this post stuck in my head, like a bad song lyric. (The good ones never get stuck. Why is that? Anyway, I digress …)

While I poured my first cup of coffee, I started thinking about it. We are swimming in opinions; everywhere I look, everywhere I listen, everywhere I read, and it only gets worse every day.

It’s enough to render me silent. I mean, do I really want to add more to the noise? And, who am I to think that anyone wants to hear my opinion in the first place? Then I began to wonder, can I even write without expressing one?

Then something else started to bother me: to what extent is opinion the cause of the strife we see escalating all around us? Not only does everyone have one, but everyone believes theirs is the right one.

Add to it all the thinking that says, if we don’t speak up and try to change things, our silence will make us complicit.

There is a certain truth to that.

Blurry eyed after little George (our dog) woke him up at 4:00 AM (daylight arrives early this time of year up here), my husband joined me in the kitchen and started pouring himself a coffee.

“What do you think the difference is between fact and opinion?” I asked.

He looked at me puzzled like, why is she asking me this before my coffee?! But he still gave me an answer.

“See that chair?”, he asked, pointing at the IKEA rail back in black-brown. “It’s made of pine. That’s a fact.”

He reached for his mug before he continued. “Pine is not the greatest wood. It’s cheaper, but you get what you pay for.” Then he paused for effect. “That’s an opinion.”

Perfectly succinct. My husband has no idea how refreshingly brilliant it is to hear answers like that. No lectures. No philosophical meanderings. No agenda.

He could have continued with his opine on pine; 35 years in a business that relies on good wood kind of makes him an expert on the subject. But he’s more inclined to connect opinion and a**holes — so he never imposes his on others, ever.

What if we were all like that? How quiet would the world get if, for one day, everyone kept their opinions to themselves?

I’m not even sure most of us would know how to do that. While it may be easy to distinguish opinion from fact when discussing the qualities of a chair, it gets murky really fast with monstrous and nebulous things, like politics, religion, education, parenting, health, art, science, history, economics, law, etc...

And this past week has been a particularly bad one that way. Sitting here at the end of it, my head and my heart are worn out; exhausted from hearing other people’s opinions expressed with dogmatic fervor.

There it is. That’s the issue. It’s not that opinions are necessarily the problem, it’s how they’re preached with the vehemence of truth attached to them. I’ve been seeing it with all things great and small, from how I should start my day, how I should write and what I should eat, to what we should do about guns, violence, extremism, Brexit and Trump.

There’s a whole lot of shoulds out there and everyone’s trying to make their shoulds louder than the others.