Im Right - You're Wrong. Fighting for the right to be right.

I was so offended and hurt when you accused me of being ‘vacuous’, that I
wanted to shoot you down and whip you in my defense, I could also have
slashed you with words and kicked you to the floor with my retaliation.

I said nothing. You closed down and walked away. Your silence and body
language told me that you prided yourself on your intellect and ‘did not suffer
fools gladly’, I was dismissed as an ‘air-head’, ignorant, apathetic, self-centred;
a peace loving mung bean from hippyville. I heard you thinking something along
the lines of ‘…pearls before swine’. I heard you silently vow to yourself that
your superior opinions would not venture out in my presence.

I thought about what you said. I thought about the conversations and your
reaction to me. I thought about it a lot, but I said nothing. I just sat swinging on
the seat at the back of the house ‘feeling’ my thoughts and observing my
responses. I looked under, over and behind my thoughts and your words. You
watched me cynically and I was aware that you were wondering if I was sitting
there ‘spaced out and thoughtless’ in my little airy-fairy world. I had the
impression that you were angry that I was not doing something. Maybe you
believe that stupid people, with no thoughts or inane conversation or
alternative/different opinions to yours, should just keep busy. The King should
think and the minions should work?

When I was younger, I knew just about everything about everything or at least
had an opinion about most things. I ate up information and regurgitated it with
passion and certainty. Politics, religion, philosophy and current affairs seemed
to impress or stimulate the debates at dinner parties and bonded friendships,
cementing them by the exchange of like-minded ideas and ideals.

(Truth is, most of our knowledge came from repeating what we had gathered
from television and reading newspapers. Rarely did we speak from personal
experience or question the validity of the information)

How or why we weren’t running the world from those dinner parties is a
mystery to me. So convinced were we that ‘The Others’ were stupid, power-
hungry and greedy. The Others were politicians, society and people from other
countries, religions or ‘different points of view’.

Although we had all of the answers and all of the solutions, I don’t remember
ever voicing our knowledge to The Others. We just got drunk, angry,
depressed, overwhelmed and afraid for ourselves, our planet and our future.
None of us, to my knowledge ever marched in a protest or wrote a letter or
petition to anyone. Not one of us entered politics or joined any overseas relief
organization. We probably never even donated anything other than coins to the
occasional Red Cross Appeal. Quite frankly, we were as hypocritical and self
righteous as every one else. Basically, we were a bunch of critics, whining
about everyone else and patting ourselves on our collective backs for our
superior observations.

When we weren’t angry with The Others, we would sometimes turn on our
own. Occasionally one of us posed a lateral viewpoint. Rarely was this
viewpoint fully expressed before an argument broke out, pecked to death by
the angry mob, sometimes to the point of things being smashed, fists pounding
down and even the occasional fight. Yes, we love our own opinions, like
hungry dogs guarding their bones we fight for the right to be right.

I don’t know if it was time, or maturity, or just a changing world, but I
somehow came to ponder the authenticity of my own thoughts. Someone once
quoted that there was no such thing as an original thought. I thought about that
a lot. I really, really wanted to have an original thought. I studied my thoughts
and the words of others in search of an original thought, just thinking about
thinking but every thought that I had turned out to be just another implant.

Now if you really want to ‘do your head in’, try and grasp the enormity of that
unoriginal thought. Everything we think is an implant from an external source.
We do not think our own thoughts. We compile our ideas from an exchange
base.

Copyright Sonya Green 2008

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