Smart Enough to Know Better

Song Lyric of the Day:

Five for Fighting / “The Riddle (You & I)”

10:17PM.
Yahoo! ran this article about bloggers today. The bottom line is that the majority of bloggers polled said they blog to tell stories, not to be journalists. The report cites most bloggers as stating that we are “primarily interested in creative, personal expression” and that we blog “to record (our) personal experiences and share them with others.” I’m certainly no exception to the rule–I started this blog when Rich and I were still in Virginia as a way to keep our family and friends up to date on what was going on in our lives. I also started it so I could express my opinions (what, me opinionated?) on various issues, news stories, and the like. And, of course, I dissect and review my fair share of TV shows and movies. But do I fancy myself a journalist? Hell, no. I might weigh in on what I think about a particular news story, but I’m not deluded enough or pretentious enough to fool myself into thinking I’m a journalist. For that matter, I don’t even consider myself a citizen journalist. I’m not reporting the news, I’m just expressing my opinions and thoughts on it. I know better than that. Which leads me to wonder, in general, why don’t people know better?

Aside from the obvious jump to judging celebrities and talking heads/political pundits (same difference) who do their best to pass their opinions off as expertise and hard facts, that is. Why don’t we use better judgment? We learn right and wrong very early in life. So why is it so easy for us to forget the difference between the two?

For instance, supermodel Christie Brinkley’s husband, Peter Cook, turned out to be a lying cheat who pursued and had an affair with a 19-year-old woman. Now said 19-year-old woman is planning on suing Cook for taking advantage of her naivete. Excuse me? She freely admits she knows he was married, had a family, blah blah. Yes, he plied her with a high-paying job, money, and a new car, but she couldn’t remove herself from the equation? She couldn’t maybe just have, oh, I don’t know, turned him down? How hard was it for this woman (not the child her lawyer and parents say she is) to stop and think that maybe having an affair with a much-older, known married man was wrong?

Now, I can’t remember my exact age at the time, but I figured out very early in life (on my own, no less) that you don’t mess around with someone else’s husband or wife. Why? Because it’s wrong. You don’t cheat on your taxes. You don’t purposely take another human being’s life. You don’t pass someone else’s work off as your own. You don’t drive drunk. You don’t make political promises you have no intention of keeping. You don’t lie to start a war.

But what do I know? I’m certainly not an expert on what constitutes right and wrong. I know better than to pretend to be someone I’m not.

After all, I’m just a blogger expressing her opinion.