Take your e-pinion and shove it.

Shove it everywhere.

I don’t mean this in a rude way. I sincerely think people need to get out there and make their opinions heard. Now, more than any other point in the history of humanity, people have an unprecedented opportunity to express how they feel about any number of subjects in such a way that many more people will have access to it than we could possibly imagine.

And it’ll damn near last forever, as well. Take me, for example. Historically, I’m a pretty flakey guy. But I predict that these words will exist long after I’ve lost interest in proclaiming how I feel about everything to everyone who takes the time to read my posts or ignore me. But even when I don’t even remember having written this, it’ll probably still be archived somewhere and be accessible to someone crazy enough to go looking for it.

To a certain extent I’m concerned that the limitless opinions available to be heard and discussed will result in certain people being hesitatnt or unwilling to express their own. They may think things like “Who cares what *I* think?” Someone, somewhere, cares. They may not agree with you (and if they don’t, they’ll damn well tell you) but they’ll care enough to argue with you.

People need to discuss things.

I probably spend more time reading comments on news articles (at www.cnn.com or www.cbc.ca) than the actual articles themselves. Some comments are obviously designed to be as inflamatory as possible. Some are so uninformed or biased as to be laughable. And some of them are simply outstanding for the deep level of insight they provide. But they’re all interesting. To me, they’re not interesting because they’re relevant, they’re interesting because they give me a view into the mind of someone I’ll probably never meet. There are billions of people on this planet and we’re only becomming more and more connected.

I find this so very fasicinating. I think of the previous ages of human hostory and I can’t help but wonder how they would hav gone down if there had been such an incredibly level of communication accessible. Imagine if someone had blogged something like “ZOMG. Ghengis Khan is coming. Hide your stuff!”

Obviously, this is nothing but a silly flight of fancy. History happened the way it did in large part due to the lack of proper communication. But it seems to me the greatest atrocities of our time occured because people didn’t know they were hapening until it was too late. They occured because people were afraid to speak up about it. They occured because people were afraid to express their opinions because they had to do it face to face and face the consequences.

While I personally feel that people should be willing to put their face behind their opinion, I can understand the unwillingness of some to do so. The anonimity of the internet allows us to bypass that. Maybe you know something that people should know about, but are afraid of others finding out that you know it?

You can tell us. You can tell everyone. That’s not an opinion. That’s an e-pinion. And while nothing may come of it, at least it’ll be out there. And years from now it’ll probably still be archived somewhere.

So take that e-pinion and shove it. Shove it down the throats of whoever will listen. They may not like it and they can easily disregard it, but you can say you tried.