Last year my wife sat on a jury. It was an assault case, cut and dried. All the evidence was there, there were eyewitnesses, it was an easy case for the prosecutor. They got to the end of the trial, deliberations were started and low and behold, two jurors said, “Not guilty.” The rest asked them why? The reply, “That’s my opinion and I’m entitled to it.”
When it really came down to it, what the rest of the jury could understand was that the two jurors felt that any time you feel threatened, you have the right to kill the person who threatens you, period. Now, I didn’t write that the victim threatened the attacker, he didn’t, the attacker owed him money and when the attacker saw the victim, he approached him and said, “I’m not paying,” and the victim replied, “Yes you are.” That was enough, so the attacker beat the victim with an 18-inch long flashlight until he was senseless. His defense, I felt threatened.
The underlying notion that facts and reality don’t matter as much as your opinion is something that I watched happen. We went from fact and science-based logic to, my opinion matters more than your facts. By the way, one of the dissenting jurors literally said this to the rest of the jurors. This notion is now the norm in much of American life, Trump is one of its prime purveyors.
COVID will hopefully be the undoing of that phenomenon. The Governor of SD is jeopardizing her constituents because in her opinion, the experts are wrong and her opinion has more value. We have reached a place where opinions are killing lots of folks in an obvious way. Yes, opinions have killed folks in less obvious ways for some time now. In fact, Bush’s opinion that there had to be WMD led to a war and the death of a significant chunk of people. And he was sticking to his gut no matter what the CIA said. The examples of major incidents are far and wide, we’ve all seen them.
My hope is that one of the big boys, a news persona or a well-recognized politician will state, “No, your opinion isn’t valid. It is just an opinion.” So that we can start a national discourse on opinion and what it means. A discourse that says, opinions are not the same as facts.
I would like to see us come to a place where we can say, “Yes, you are entitled to your opinion, as long as you keep it close. As long as it doesn’t jeopardize the rest of us. And if it is contradicted by science, it has zero value.”
“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
Lebowski, The, Big...
