“People say you have a right to your opinion. That’s only half correct. You have a right to an informed opinion. If you don’t know what you’re talking about you should shut the hell up and listen.”
– Donald M. Williams
I was about 14 or 15 when my dad told me that. It made a huge impact on me. I can hear it as clearly if he had said it this morning.
Don Williams was born in 1929. A child of the Depression, his family managed to put food on the table because my grandfather toiled for decades in the coal mines of southwest Wyoming. In fact, Grandpa Lester Williams turned down a contract to pitch for the Brooklyn Dodgers because he had a wife and three children to feed. In those days coal mining, though torturous and deadly, paid more than baseball.
“I try to not screw up my kids with my serious thinking. I want them to think for themselves.”
I heard Dad proudly tell his friends this many times. It was usually after I had said something clever enough to get a chuckle from them. Then he would dismiss me with a proud yet insistent smile because he was of a generation that believed children should be seen and not heard.
When I was young we had three TV stations and one newspaper. Every day they all told each national story with the same set of facts and without embellishment. Political stories were reported without implications. They simply told us what happened without telling us what we should think about it. If you wanted some thoughtful, opinionated perspective you had to turn to the page clearly labeled, EDITORIALS.
My dad passed away 15 years ago this month. He had a cell phone but still wrote letters by hand and did his taxes with pencil and paper. Most mornings he would ride his bicycle to the nearby McDonalds and have coffee with a bunch of men his own age. It was a highlight of his day. They would sit for a couple of hours, he told me, “solving the world’s problems”.
Dad was a working ranch cowboy until he joined the Navy. He was a proud American, politically a democrat until Reagan changed his brand but not his mind.
I can’t imagine what Dad would tell me about his country now.
What would he think about so-called fake news, alternative news, and a president who seems to be more concerned about defending himself from personal attacks than doing his job? What would Dad say about a national news media that has given up all pretense of being unbiased and American citizens who angrily attack each other with emotional opinions created from nothing more than sensationalism and their own blind, lazy ignorance?
“You have a right to an informed opinion…”
I still miss my dad. Sometimes I forget he’s gone. I want to grab the phone and ask him what he thinks about something in the news. Then I remember, I can’t do that.
Sometimes, for his sake, I think that’s best.
(Copyright 2017, David L. Williams. All rights reserved.)