I have a lot
of opinions. Most people do; they fuel the furnace of passion that is humanity.
I don’t have extensive criteria for people I can like, but opinions are way up
on my list of essentials. What are we without our opinions? Who are we?
I don’t know
where I’d be without my opinions. I’d probably still be watching Pokémon
because I couldn’t have formulated the opinion that the new episodes suck. In
fact, I wouldn’t even like Pokémon, or anything, because what we like is based
on our opinion of it. Even in juvenile terms, whereby my brain liked the
colours in Pokémon, and the different monsters, we do have opinions, and they
drive us to do more than simply exist.
Without
opinions, we couldn’t be human beings, because we would have nothing but our
instinct to eat, grow, reproduce etc. We’d be nothing but a MRSFERG, the
characteristics of a living thing, with no sense of actual being to
differentiate us from the most basic organisms. Cats would be more advanced
than us; because cats have opinions (trust me I live with two).
I don’t want
to get too sciency, mostly because beyond the first year course, which I lapped
up with puppy dog eagerness (the only thing I didn’t do the same with in first
year was Irish, because I had already established my distaste for it), I have
no qualifications to do so. I may know the first year course by heart, and most
of the junior cert one, but that does not make me anything more than an amateur
scientist. Without going so far as to make fun of the Junior Cert science
course, I would have to describe it as rudimentary at best. I do have the
qualifications to say that; seeing as upon being greeted with the fact that all
pain comes from the brain, and not a specific part of your body, there were
more than a few choruses of ‘say what?’ from my class.
In yet
another seemingly vain attempt to get to the point, I don’t want to get too
sciency because that is boring (to most people – I love it) and opinions are
the furthest thing from boring. They are, simply put, humanity. If Shakespeare
wasn’t of the opinion that his ramblings were worthy of the stage, than Junior
Cert students would not be regaled, in far too much detail, of the tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet (though I only view Romeo dying as a tragedy because I saw the
version with Leonardo Di Caprio). If George Washington wasn’t of the opinion
that the American Revolutionaries must “resolve to conquer or die”, we would
not have the 50 United States of America.
If I didn’t
think that opinions make us who and what we are, you wouldn’t be reading this.
Opinions make history and opinions write history. Opinion is what made the
Republic of Ireland, the Irish Free State, and OPEC. Move away from the
political and you get Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism.
Opinion gave us equality for African-Americans, Democracy, Dictatorship,
Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Feminism and all the ‘isms’ in between.
Opinion is
not an inherently good thing. Opinion led to horrors too; the genocide, rape
camps, the purges, terrorism, the Klan. Something like opinion is so individual
that it can never be used solely for good, because people are not always good.
Without
opinion we would be nothing. We would never have built our great civilisations,
economies, works of art and literature, our music, languages. If the French
didn’t love their language they wouldn’t have tried to make a French word for
e-mail, but they do, so they did (even if no-one bothers to use it).
I have
opinions and they are what make me who I am. Without opinions I couldn’t write,
there would be nothing to read; in short the world would be a horrible place.
Opinions are my furnace, my burning passion.
Opinion is
everything I love, everyone I love, everything to befall the race that I belong
to, the good and the bad. I can’t promise that opinion is good, but I can show
you what we are without it; nothing at all.
©EmmaTobin 2013
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