How many times has someone defended their opinion to you by stating "that's just my opinion"? Do we as a people need to back up the claims and opinions we have with solid, verifiable facts, or is conjecture and feelings alone good enough? No, an opinion and a feeling are two different things. While most feelings do in fact stem from some sort of outside stimuli, they are vague, less easily defined than an opinion. People who think they do not need to defend their opinion with facts are wrong.

An opinion is worthless if it does not come from reality. If i believed that gnomes lived at the center of the earth and were plotting to one day rise up and kill us all, it would do no one any good for me to voice this feeling. It isn't an opinion, it's a feeling, a feeling of fear and paranoid that, while it might have been caused by some sort of outward action or reaction, it is not based on varifiable fact. If I could show that there really were gnomes living beneath the earth, and if I could show that they meant us ill, then that would support my opinion. Otherwise, what good would this opinion do?

This is doubly true for writers, especially those writers who post on this website. If you write an article as a statement of opinion, then you need to state within the article a set of facts that back that opinion up. You must strive to refute what any potential debater might say before he or she has the chance to say it. That is good writing, and it indicates a lucidity of opinion. Without this, you are not writing about an opinion, but only about your feelings. Nothing is so mealy-mouthed as an expression of opinion that is based on nothing more than how you feel. There is a place for articles of "feeling" but they are generally not political in nature, more often than not, they deal with every day life, kittens infested with maggots, things of that nature. A political statement needs to be grounded in fact.

A person should never have an opinion that isn't based on reality. There are so many people in this world who blithely parrot other people's opinions without investing any energy into researching the issue or finding more out about it. Thus begins the cult of personality whereby some figurehead can spout his or her viewpoint with no worry about reality and others will defend this point of view, sometimes to the death, never realizing that what they believe in was a lie. This is why it's of the utmost importance to think for yourselves, spend the time to find out what the facts are about an issue and how you feel about those facts, and decide for yourselves where you stand on the issue. Otherwise, your opinion isn't a valid one. And please don't whine that someone doesn't respect your opinion. If you can't justify the things that you say with solid evidence than it is you who does not respect your opinion.