Originally published in Countryside Post, Issue 1.14.
People are still talking about the hate mail we got in issue 1.10—to me, it’s old news, but some people have yet to put in their two cents about it, and when they meet me, they do. Some of them, unfortunately, end the conversation with, “Well, you gotta respect a person’s right to have an opinion.”
I hate that saying, because it’s not true. Few really respect any opinions other than their own. Any other opinions are worthless unless they agree with it. And if you’re under 30 or “inexperienced,” you don’t know any better, so shut up and let your elders talk. (Being under 30, I deal with this attitude constantly.)
There’s little respect for opinions, or a person’s right to have one. The only reason people say “you gotta respect the right to have an opinion” is because we want people to respect our opinions, even though, deep down, they don’t.
The only opinions I personally respect are informed or well-thought-out ones. Most opinions are knee-jerk reactions, so it’s refreshing to actually hear something that took brainpower to generate. That’s why I respect them—I don’t have to agree with them. Sometimes they’re hard to distinguish from the usual knee-jerk reactions, but if a person doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it turns up: they’ll base an opinion on speculation, or use a weak argument, or attempt to justify bad behavior. Or they’ll use a lot of insults. If the facts back you up, you don’t need insults, and insults become a very fast way to recognize useless opinions.
And once I’ve identified an opinion as valueless, I give it no further thought. And that’s why I’m still amazed when people bring up last month’s hate mail.
That said, if you’ve written down any well-thought-out opinions, please send them to the Post. They may not generate a month of small-talk conversation starters, but maybe they’ll make some more people think. Besides, I like them.
—Kent Leslie, managing editor
Update, 11/17/2009: The point behind “Letter from the Editor” was to discuss the newspaper’s policies. This column was a bit of a stretch from the point, though: this was about what I thought. It’s me ranting about how I don’t respect opinions unless they’ve been thought through. I very loosely connected it to Ms. Wright’s hate mail, and could claim it was about that, but I couldn’t claim it had anything to do with the Post’s policies—’cause regardless of whether I respected someone’s opinion in a letter, I was still gonna publish the letter.
It’s because of stuff like this that I wound up renaming the column “Kent’s Weekly Rant” in February 1999.