We both agree that each individual has a right to their opinions, regardless of how controversial their preferred topics may be today. At one time, we could sit around a dinner table, sharing our views while others listened attentively. But no more.
Times have changed, and we are best to keep our controversial opinions to ourselves to avoid offending others and appearing to impose our views on those with conflicting views. Then again, there are situations in which we may find ourselves in the presence of others whom we know think as we do, creating an open forum to discuss our views. But, in today’s world, these situations are few. Instead, many of us keep our opinions to ourselves.
I often review the world news, searching for a topic for the day’s post, but I find most stories reflect a viewpoint that may be construed as political and contrary to the views of many of our readers. As a result, we avoid such articles and subsequent stories to maintain our stance of staying neutral in our posts over 11 years later.
It’s a challenge avoiding expressing our views when most topics in today’s world are considered to have a political bent of one source or another. Each time I sit down to prepare the day’s post, on many occasions, I start to write, only to find myself abruptly stopping and deleting everything I’ve written so far, feeling the topic is too controversial for our site.
Over the years, we’ve promised our readers we’d stay neutral and have strived to maintain that stance. When talking in a group about our site, we often say we avoid discussing politics, religion, and sex, three taboo topics in this type of venue.
In 2020, while India was in lockdown, varying views about COVID-19 and other topics became more glaring than ever. We were at a loss for content. After all, we had no exciting activities during that time. The highlight of our days consisted of my walking the corridors for exercise to the tune of 5 miles, 8 km each day, while Tom ran up and down the stairs to the parking garage.
During that time, I perused Facebook for longer periods than I’d ever done in the past. But, during that period, I found many Facebook posts that consisted of hateful opinions and vitriol. Sure, we were all confined and frustrated, but I couldn’t justify hatefulness regarding the views of others, especially those who disagreed with the opinions of many others.
It was during that time I was bursting at the seams to express my views on seeing hateful posts on Facebook, and I prepared one of our posts on March 30, 2020, with the heading reading,
“Please “unfriend me” if…Social media during lockdown…”
(Click on the above heading to read that post).
I don’t promote adding more friends to my Facebook account. Overall, I preferred to keep the number of “friends” on my profile to a minimum to avoid it becoming overwhelming, keeping up with many people I didn’t know, their photos, and their birthdays. However, I have welcomed some of our readers who have invited me to become a friend.
Uploading that post during that problematic time brought me considerable relief to have expressed my views on this topic. As I’ve mentioned, we seldom run across any “haters” and prefer to keep it that way. Subsequently, we keep many of our views to ourselves.
Thank you to all of our readers for keeping our site kind, friendly, and considerate, with pleasant and meaningful comments and email messages. We promise to continue on the path of keeping our site neutral and unencumbered by contentious and controversial opinions.
Be well.
Photo from ten years ago today, January 18, 2014:
