I tried to start a column at various publications three times before this one. Maybe four. The details get fuzzy because I’ve spent years trying to forget the embarrassment of it. Each time, I’d get a few weeks in and realize the same thing: I didn’t actually have anything to say. I had opinions. Lord knows I had opinions. But opinions aren’t a column. Opinions are what you have in the shower. Having something to say requires something else — perspective, seasoning, enough mileage on you that your observations have earned the right to take up someone else’s time.
I was well into my 40s before I finally had a sustainable one. I needed more experience, more learning, more years of watching things go sideways and trying to figure out why. You can’t rush it. I know because I tried.
I wish more people understood that.
Abraham Lincoln is credited as saying, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” He wouldn’t have said it if there weren’t a lot of fools speaking nonsense at the time. I fear the problem has gotten oh so much worse.
Everybody has a platform now. Everybody has a microphone, a comment section, a Facebook Live stream, a Substack, a TikTok, and an urgent moral obligation to tell the world exactly what they think about something they learned existed seven minutes ago.
Think about a certain type of Southern man from the 1980s. You know the type. He had opinions — of course he did — but he kept them largely to himself. Not because he was timid. Because he understood something about the limits of his own knowledge. He wasn’t going to mouth off about things he didn’t know enough about. That wasn’t weakness. That was a discipline that we have apparently decided is no longer necessary.
That same type of man, or at least his cultural descendants, has transformed into something I barely recognize. Now he’s a rabid wolf on the internet, willing to torch his reputation, his relationships, and apparently his basic dignity over something he misheard on a YouTube video — and I do mean misheard, because the evidence suggests he’s not entirely sure what he’s watching. He has found a platform and he has confused that platform with authority. He has confused volume with truth. He has confused having a strong feeling about something with actually understanding it.
We all have. That’s the honest version of this.
The noise level in this country right now is staggering. Not because people are passionate — passion is fine, passion is good — but because passion has been decoupled from knowledge and nobody seems to think that’s a problem. You can care deeply about something you don’t understand. You can be completely wrong at the top of your lungs. Social media will not stop you. The algorithm will, in fact, encourage you.
That country man from the 1980s wasn’t perfect. He had his blind spots, same as anybody. But he understood one thing we’ve forgotten: knowing where your knowledge runs out is a kind of knowledge too.
That’s what Lincoln, or at least the quote attributed to him says.
Lincoln and the good ‘ol boy didn’t need to weigh in on everything. There was once a time when folks didn’t feel left out when a conversation went past what they knew. They know how to let it go by. They figured somebody who knew more would speak up, and most of the time somebody did.
Now nobody lets anything go by. Every headline gets a reaction. (Usually that damn laughing emoji.) Every reaction gets a counter-reaction. By lunchtime, thousands of people who had never heard of a thing at breakfast are fighting about it like they’ve studied it their whole lives.
And the people who actually have studied it their whole lives? They’re getting drowned out. Or they don’t engage, because the wise don’t have to prove anything. They have credentials and knowledge. Why are the fools so loud and obnoxious? Because deep down, despite what they think they know, they still feel a need to prove themselves. That’s a psychological thing, not an evidence thing. You can’t win an intellectual debate just by shouting louder than the other guy, and if you constantly find yourself defending an argument and fighting a war that the other side isn’t fighting — that’s a sign that you’ve already lost. The other side is just laughing at you at this point.
But, the fools aren’t the problem. Lincoln’s quote tells us there have always been plenty of those. There is in fact an entire book of the Bible devoted to telling the difference in a fool and a wise person. The problem is that fools used to be easy to spot. Now they’ve got the same microphone as everybody else, and it’s hard to tell who has earned it and who is just loud.
You can’t fix the algorithm. You can’t make the country quieter. But you can decide what you add to the noise.
Before you post, ask yourself whether you know this or just feel it. Whether you read past the headline. Whether you’d say it with somebody in the room who has spent a career on it.
If the answer is no, let it go by. It’s not cowardice. It’s not weakness. It’s the humility of admitting that there are people who know more than you and it’s not a crime to not have a fully formed opinion that you can articulate.
Opinions are what you have in the shower. Leave a few of them there.
B.T. Clark is the Publisher of The Georgia Sun and author of Principles Are Like Pants… You Ought to Have Some. Over two decades in journalism, he has served as Managing Editor of Neighbor Newspapers in metro Atlanta and Digital Director at Times-Journal Inc., earning multiple awards along the way. His work has appeared in newspapers across the state, including The Cherokee Tribune and The Marietta Daily Journal.
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