Every now and then I get a notion to write about something that irks me, a point of view or statement made by someone else that doesn’t sit quite right with me.
I’ll fire up notepad, create a new blank file, and start typing in an effort to coral both my thoughts and the random words spewing from my head. Inevitably I give up.
Why? Because so much of what I read these days is so badly informed that arguing against it is pointless, or is written by someone who won’t even consider the fact that they might not be 100% on the money, or seems to be written using statements that other people take to be absolutes.
It’s the “absolutes” that really annoy me.
Taking a statement with the presumption that it is complete and full encapsulation of an opinion is very short-sighted, and the usual follow on from that is to presume that you are also in complete opposition with the differing point of view.
So “I like the colour blue” suddenly becomes “I like every colour that is a possible shade of blue” and is extrapolated into “therefore you must hate red”.
So I don’t write those types of things anymore. Not that I wrote all that many of them in the first place but in my continuing quest to avoid negativity wherever I can, I choose not to write about that stuff.
I choose not to write about a lot of other stuff too but that’s for entirely different reasons.
I so agree with you. I thought it was getting older that made me see every shade of grey in an ‘argument’ but I think I’ve always been like that. Even less do I like the people who make statements you don’t agree with and then try to ‘win you round’ to their point of view as if yours is not just different, but wrong. If I made a sweeping ill – informed generalisation i.e. starting ‘Men are…’ my old Gran used to say – ‘you’ve missed out the word ‘some’ in that sentence’ Yes MY old Gran – the Irish one!!
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