Opinion blindness
I’m reading all these posts about the government shutdown and abortion laws and every other news story under the sun. I’m trying to be patient and listen (although sometimes I still can’t help buy add my 2 cents).
There is one thing that strikes me over and over again. If I’m being honest, it’s probably the thing I complain about the most. I call it Opinion blindness.
It’s the idea that we give our opinion about things as if we actually know what’s going when we really don’t. The other side effect of opinion blindness is that we completely miss the irony and hypocrisy of what we’re saying.
Let me clarify with an example.
After the horrific shooting at the Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania I saw a religious leader on TV lambasting our president. It’s nothing new. Presidents since the dawn of time have been the recipient of well-deserved and misdirected anger alike. But here’s the irony. The religious leader was blasting the president for speaking about gun control (no, I’m not even getting into that debate here) when all he thought the president should have been doing is “spreading love over the community.”
Wait… what?
This man went on a 3 minute rant about how Trump is _______ (fill in the blank with your criticism of choice) because this man believed our president’s job is to spread love over the community in times of crisis. Let me be clear. I don’t disagree with the man. But given a primetime TV spot, this man of faith used much of his time to drop hatred on our president instead of doing the EXACT thing that he was complaining about. Why wasn’t this religious leader spreading love over the community if he thought it was so important?
But you see, we all do it. I do it. In fact, I just did it a few weeks ago. I complained in a Facebook post about men not shoveling their single mother and elderly neighbors’ sidewalks. And then, just a few days ago, I got inadvertently called out by another friend on Facebook for shoveling my driveway to get my car out and not always shoveling my sidewalk so that the people that don’t have cars can get where they’re going.
My question is this: why is it so easy for us to see the fault in others, and even complain about it publicly, while ignoring that same fault in ourselves? I don’t have an answer, but I have a guess.
I think it’s easier because we reflect more on other people’s actions that we do our own. When’s the last time you truly sat down and reflected on your words and actions over the last 24 hours? Or last 7 days? When is the last time you actually looked back at the words you said and the actions you took to see how they affected everyone else around you?
You see, the real problem is that we’re selfish creatures. When someone else does something that we think is unacceptable or that affects us negatively, we feel it. We let it consume us. We act as if every action they took was intent on hurting us.
In addition, we assume we know everything that has gone in to someone else’s decision. We judge their motives (which we never truly know) and we think that we would make the “right” decision if we were in their shoes.
I have news for you. You wouldn’t. You would screw it up to. And so would I. We simply aren’t capable of making all the right decisions all the time. We are all flawed. We are all broken. And we all get it wrong as often as we get it right.
If we have any chance of overcoming opinion blindness, here are a few things we need:
Less judgment and more grace.
Fewer assumptions and more conversations (if you’re calling someone else a name, it’s not a conversation… that’s an immature disagreement).
A stronger focus on unity and fewer attempts at segregation (yes, that name calling leads directly to segregation into “us” and “them” categories).
That is what we need. But then again, maybe I’m just blinded by my own ideas as well.
P.S. This is not an excuse to lay down when you see something obviously immoral such as a direct assault on a human life, mistreatment of someone based on race or any of the number of atrocities that we see on a regular basis. This is merely a guideline on how and when to handle the gray situations. The ones that aren’t nearly as clear as we make them out to be.