So recently, a long time friend of mine, Shawna Gagne, decided to run for the NDP position within Moncton West. It shocked the hell out of me to see that she was going into politics but hey, why not right? She invited me to join her NDP Facebook page and I figured it couldn’t hurt. After all, she is someone I know and I was curious to see what she’d put on there.
One of the more recent links came up as a link to the NB NDP homepage. Out of plain curiosity, I clicked the link and up came the site, in French. No English to be found anywhere on the site until I spotted a button that read “English” which I then clicked and it proceeded to show me the site in English.
Now for me, as an English speaking and English reading resident of NB, I was a little annoyed by this. In the province of NB, we have a majority of English folks in this province. But yet this particular political party chose to have their homepage launch in French, regardless of whether you actually loaded the English or French site (they have different URLs). So no matter how you got to the site, you were always presented with French first.
This “irked” me. I wasn’t mad or pissed or anything. Just annoyed. In a province where the majority is English, why would they choose to have French as the main language for their site when the overall majority of folks in NB are English? Turns out there was actually some kind of a bug that forced the French to come up when you went to the English site. I didn’t learn about this until later and as far as I know, it has since been corrected so my original “irkness” was unfounded. Regardless, at the time, I was a bit irked.
So, I went on Facebook and made a comment on Shawna’s post saying “In a province where the majority speaks English, you’d think the launch page would be in English. Not so much.”. I then get a reply from someone else who then proceeds to completely miss the point I was making and turn it into something else. She then sends me a PM and blasts me for being a Pat Buchanan type personality and that I’m trying to be a martyr. Like WTF?
Regardless, once again I am shown that when I make comments on any sort of public forum, whether it be a message board, or Facebook, I tend to end up having to listen to a bunch of whiny f*ckers who insist that my opinion sucks and that I should grow up. I can’t tell you how many times I have voiced my opinions on various topics because I thought it was important to voice an opinion, only to sit back and watch people gripe at me because of my opinion.
Each and every time I see shit like this happen, I think to myself, this is the reason why I shouldn’t post stuff online or if I do, at least keep it to a minimal amount of folks via my blog (or those who read this blog entries via FB). This happens all the time. In this case, it happens to be about a subject that quite frankly SERIOUSLY burns my ass. I have all kinds of opinion about the whole English/French thing in Moncton but I keep it to myself generally because it is SUCH a touchy subject that no matter what you say, people will get pissed.
I’ve made comments on plenty of other online forums and Facebook, Twitter, and other places and it always seems that I get hit with a pile of flack. Is it the way I express myself or is it that my opinions just infuriate people? Or is it just that many folks “online” tend to be a lot more vocal because they can hide behind their computer screens?
So let me ask you this: Is it better for you to voice your opinion out there, knowing full well people will piss all over it, or do you just hold your thoughts to yourself and when asked cite the famous quote “I have no opinion”? There’s nothing wrong with a good debate, but man it irritates the hell out of me when I express a very simple opinion and folks take it completely the wrong way. Is it better to avoid misunderstanding or just say it and be done with it?
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