Opinions are like a*&holes...

There's a new era among us.
In 100 years, we have seen the industrial age, the information age, and now there's a new age that parasites itself on the information age.

It's always been around.
Technology makes it more accessible and louder.
It sickens me.

I'm calling it the opinion age.

People have always had opinions.
Before social media, an opinion only had the breadth of someone's voice and network.
If you didn't like what someone had to say, you left the room. You disassociated yourself with the nut and you only hung out with people who believed in the same things you did.
If you were in radio or newspaper, your opinion was unleashed on the world if your manager allowed it.
Enter Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh with their right and left wing agendas.

If a person didn't have access to a radio microphone, and they called into a station, there was a gatekeeper.
The gatekeeper's responsibility was to keep crazies out.
If there was hate to distribute, a score to settle or an opinion without fact, the gatekeeper kept the person away from the masses.

Today, social media has given everyone a mass media microphone.
No gatekeeper.
No where to escape.
Just flimsy opinions flying around like paper airplanes.

We all have them.
I'm ok with that. I don't have to agree, and neither do you.
But when they are unleashed to create hate, fear, and anger, I have a problem.

I don't like where this world is heading.
I don't like internet trolls.
And I definitely don't like negative posts to build on hatred.

I spoke to a man from Pakistan yesterday who lived in the Kashmir region for 25 years.
He saw the devastations of hatred and is worried like me.

In 1963, there was an psychological experiment called The Milgram Experiment conducted at Yale.
The test was to see how far a person would go to obey orders from a superior.  The test subject was told to increase the voltage of shock on an actor in the other room for different reasons. With each increasing voltage, the actor pled for the shock to stop. In some cases the perceived shock was equal to a lethal dose and the test subject still obeyed his orders.

Professor Milgram wanted to understand why German soldiers could obey superiors to execute millions of prisoners during the Holocaust. I believe he discovered that humans want to conform their behaviour to be accepted by a group.

The actor in the Milgram experiment was in a different room and unseen by the test subject.
I also believe if the actor would have been seen, the test subject may not have gone as far.

It is my OPINION that as long as we don't SEE the pain of another person, we don't experience, care or understand what has been done.

If a childhood friend dies and you haven't seen her in years, you may be saddened. But you may not feel the pain the family feels if you don't see them in mourning.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to witness it, did it make a noise.
The logical answer is, "Of course".
My philosophical answer is, "No, because noise has to be heard to exist".

It is my OPINION that humanity is losing its way while guarded by a computer screen.  The pain is not seen, therefore doesn't exist on the other end of the internet.

Be careful what opinions you post online, your words have more power than you think.