Reading the opinion section of The Badger Herald, I am troubled by the disturbing number of opinions contaminating the page. Opinions are insidiously infectious little germs. They cause their victims to do nothing but whine, whine, whine. If the victim is not quarantined in time, hapless bystanders will soon complain that the first victim is whining for all the wrong reasons and a vicious cycle of opinions will soon swallow the immediate population in a swirling, pestilential torrent.
"The Cosby Show should air Wednesdays at eight," one might say. "Why must the powers that be move the program to Tuesdays at three, in direct conflict with my chemistry lab? Truly, I am sick with despair." "Indeed not," another would reply. "I tutor underprivileged children on Wednesdays; the change in the broadcast's schedule makes me positively feverish with joy." Indeed, the opinion sickness is so prevalent that I must resort to using a rather trite example to avoid accusations of flippancy from those contaminated with the relevant strain of opinion.
To be fair, an opinion can occasionally have beneficial side effects that extend beyond mere whining. Some people today are able to put their opinions to good use. For simplicity's sake, let us use protest rallies as an example. Millions of people worldwide used their opinions to publicly rally against the Iraq War, as many also did 40 years ago during the Vietnam War. Allow me to insert a disclaimer: The use of rioting and violence here and overseas is an example of active opinionating taken too far. While historically effective on at least a temporary scale, it is never something to encourage or look upon with fondness. Active opposition, using our first example, since the initial outbreak four years ago has decreased markedly. A rally in Madison last Sunday drew no more than two dozen, while the last gay rights protest in Madison attracted barely two and a half dozen. This does not mean that people in the current and last couple of years have any shortage of opinions.
Here is the part where I present another example. I am going to say one word, and this word will trigger a pre-conditioned reaction in many of your heads. Anything I say about said word will cause the same people to immediately judge this entire article based on any opinion I may give to that word alone. Are you ready? Here it comes: Israel!
This issue has been fodder for perhaps the greatest number of opinions published on these very pages, certainly in the last month; eight articles concerning Israel have been published in that time. Half of these publications directly rebuked a previous article, and the majority of them unleashed a fury of feedback in the form of online response. The essence of the responses ranged from "You are wrong" to "You are right," with added bits of witticism thrown in here and there (Sarcasm again? That is so original). The troubling thing about most — though certainly not all — of these articles and their online responses is their eerily well-defined opinion of who should be blamed for the seething unrest in the region and what exactly should be done to stop it. With one exception, none of the writers has ever even visited the region.
Opinions of this particular nature create a massive amount of presumption. The victims passively collect information, then take the desirable parts and sort them — if someone has not already done so for them — until the casualties presume to know what is best for those crazy foreigners living on the other side of the globe. I mean, those are facts, and you obviously can't argue with facts, and thus the opinions — the passive, constricting opinions — are born. The fact is, in my opinion (irony, get it?), the deep-seated sectarian opinions held by the violent inhabitants of the Middle East is such that no one raised this side of the Prime Meridian can ever truly hope to understand or appreciate it, and the history of the region includes so much widespread violence, "warranted" or not, that to point fingers at who started what or who should back down first is irrelevant and useless, respectively. Better to do your best to quell those opinions and leave them to more positively affect those who actively work to resolve the issue, and, hopefully, as a result of their actual involvement, have more constructive, realistic opinions to offer.
Jack Garigliano ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in English.
