IDoNotGetIt

I am not an unemotional person.  But I do balance my emotions with pragmatism.  Yesterday I read a news article about a horrible situation involving exchange students being mistreated by their host families.  At the end of the article, I had to choke back tears when it wrote that one of the teens, who had been malnourished and neglected in the home he was staying in, was still thankful to the US for the opportunity to come to our country and get a good education.  Now keep in mind that the conditions that he had to endure here were so bad that criminal charges are being brought against people.  I had a pretty strong emotional reaction to that.

Now today, I’m reading an article about the Sears Tower getting renamed the Willis Tower.  The absurdity of being outraged over this renaming is mindboggling.  Here are a few quotes from the hyperemotional over reactors.

“You don’t mess with a landmark. It would be like trying to change the name of the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a reference point. I think it’s disorienting to try to change the name.”

“Chicago is going to lose a big part of what is its identity and I don’t know what’s going to fill that space.”

Listening to that last one, you’d think they’re tearing the building down.  Why do people overreact to their emotions like this? 

Death is another one that people overreact to way too much.  You’d think that people just started dying a few years ago.  Everyone who has ever lived has died or will die.  This isn’t a surprise, yet people act surprised by it everyday.  People say things like “children shouldn’t die”.  Ok, it’s sad when a child dies but it happens.  Whether it’s accidents or disease or whatever, children and adults die.  I don’t understand why people can’t just be sad that it happened, outraged when necessary (if it was preventable or murder, etc.) and move on.  It’s not the end of the world, check your emotions, they are useful as long as you don’t overreact to them.

I got in a rather heated debate the other day that made me want to write a post about opinions.  We were talking about a certain political figure in this state (South Carolina) who decided to take an interesting vacation out of the country.  Anyway, he was giving his opinion about what happened and I was thinking “this is totally out of line with the evidence that we have so far which actually indicates the opposite of what he is saying”.  So I said “hold on, you’re wrong” and then proceeded to give my opinion and state the facts that I based it on.  Well, he went completely off the handle, essentially telling me that I had no right to tell him that he was wrong because he was just stating his opinion.

When did opinion come to mean the same thing as “I’m just sayin”?  Tagging something as opinion doesn’t release one from responsibility.  As I told him at the time, I believe he was simply under the mistaken impression that by telling him that he is wrong, I was categorically stating that I am right.  Considering how he started calling me a know-it-all, I’m pretty sure that that is the problem.  This is a common problem with people who “don’t like to argue”.  I pointed out that it is possible that we are both wrong but his analysis does not add up to the evidence available and that is all I mean by saying “you’re wrong”.

But I’ve noticed often how people think that prefacing their comments with “opinion” makes them immune to challenge.  It doesn’t.  And your opinion can still be wrong if your facts are wrong/incomplete or you have misinterpreted the facts. 

This is probably elementary school’s fault.  I recall learning the difference between fact and opinion and we were taught that opinions were things like “blue is a pretty color”.  Since “pretty” is completely subjective, that statement can’t really be wrong.  However, the opinions we were expressing were not this subjective.  They were based on, though incomplete and unverified evidence, evidence none the less which means it is possible to be WRONG.