Opinions matter

Quickly scrolling down the main news items yesterday, three things struck me. The first one was the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic games and how, apart from all the kerfuffle about them, I'm really looking forward to watching the snow-boarding, the skiing and the ice-skating, and people sliding down on tea trays. I'm sure the whole world is watching and hoping that a lot of good, will come out of it.
The second one was David Cameron asking people to ring up their friends in Scotland and pleading with them to vote to stay together. Most of the people I know that live in Scotland, are of English origin, and most of my Scottish friends live in England.So I'll just end a few emails to let them all know how fond of them I am.

These two things made me aware of how many comments these topics invite. How interesting the comments are and how sometimes I enjoy reading the comments more than the actual article.
Before we had on-line newspapers, the letters page could only print a handful of readers' comments, now one single article can elicit a huge response of easily up to one thousand comments. I find it interesting to see what other people think. It opens our minds up to see someone else's point of view. It must make the journalists writing the articles think even harder about what they are trying to put across.
It isn't good to be opinionated, it can be disquieting to hear someone putting across dogmatic views. However when someone gives me their frank, honest opinion in a calm rational way, I feel it's a sort of privilege, that they are letting me into their innermost thoughts. Opinions need to be flexible and open to change, we've all got something to learn and improve.