Who Cares What You Think?

Every year we like to kick off the year responding to the remark we so often hear, “Who cares what you think?” Good question and our response is always the same, “Nobody.” A friend of ours once owned the only newspaper and radio station in a small Illinois town. He ran editorials in the paper and personally voiced them on his station. His paper would take one side of an issue and he would dispense the opposite on the radio; he wrote both. He believed a good opinion writer should be able to see both sides of an issue or they shouldn’t be writing opinion.

We are not sure we can follow that ideal in every issue we address. However, we do not write to convince anyone to take up our position. We make every effort to look at both sides. We do the research; often we will have fifteen or twenty pages of research attached to a five-hundred-word OP-ED. However, ethics rarely has two acceptable sides. On the other hand, it isn’t always a simple matter of right and wrong either. Like it or not, the situation can change the ethical call. That doesn’t mean the ends justifies the means, but there are times when one has to think about the impact of hard-line adherence to what seems the right thing at the moment. Or as our friend Saul Alinsky once defined truth, “You don’t have to cross the street to tell someone how ugly they are.” 

So if we don’t write to change your mind, or help you make up your mind, and if we don’t expect people to care what we think, why do we write? We write because we feel the issues we raise are important and we want to get you to thinking about them. We want you to sort through the facts. We want you to search the internet, to read and take a position. If you throw a brick every time our OP-EDs turn up on your computer or in print somewhere, that’s fine, at least you are thinking about the issue.

Beware those who write for any other reason.  

 

Beware the manipulators.