Source: Site Editorial
By Ingolfur Stangeland
The thing about opinions
is that everyone has at least one
The poem
Four contrasts: opinion and voice, options and choice, truth and lies, life and death.
Everyone has opinions
Not everyone has a voiceEveryone has options
Not Everyone has a choiceAll would hear the truth
Yet everybody liesAll would live forever
Yet everybody dies
Why it belongs here
An opinion is a beginning, not a verdict.
The poem moves through four distinctions that are easy to collapse: having an opinion is not the same as being heard; having options is not the same as being free to choose; wanting truth does not make every statement truthful; and wanting permanence does not suspend reality.
Everyone Has Opinions begins at the same fault line. Public debate contains beliefs, values, predictions, slogans, questions and factual propositions. They do not all call for the same response. An opinion can be considered or contested, but a checkable claim asks for something more exact: attribution, context, evidence and a verdict proportionate to what the record can establish.
That is why this site separates rhetoric from the underlying proposition. A straw man should not inherit the verdict meant for the original claim. Repetition is not corroboration. Popularity is not proof. Uncertainty should remain visible instead of being converted into confidence for the sake of a cleaner headline.
The purpose is not to eliminate opinions. It is to make room for them without allowing factual claims to borrow the protections of opinion—or opinions to be misrepresented as facts. Voice matters. Choice matters. Evidence matters too.