Some may be sad to know that I’m calling it quits here at the Daily Herald. I suppose others will be happy, and I suspect the vast majority of people will be either ambivalent or may not even notice that I’m gone.

And frankly, I don’t blame any of you who hold those opinions.

Since this is my last op-ed, I figured I should mention it because it’d feel weird to leave the party without saying goodbye.

I’ve been writing op-eds for the Daily Herald for five and a half years now.

That’s 800ish words a week, for 286 weeks or 228,800 words.

That’s roughly the length of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Of course, I don’t need to tell you, dear reader, that my quality of writing is much worse than Steinbeck’s. And I say this as someone who doesn’t care for Steinbeck.

This is, of course, a rough estimate, but I bet it’s not that far off, even if I accounted for my car crash hiatus.

Needless to say, I’ve expressed a lot of opinions. Some were earnest, some were vulnerable, some were humorous, some of them were mean, some of them were hopeful, and others were essentially written because there was a deadline and I needed to turn in something.

More importantly, I wanted to point out that I stand by a lot of the things I said, but I’m not sure I stand by every single one of them.

For example, I still want Hollywood to make a Static Shock movie, but I think I’ve come around on the importance of representation in the media. Additionally, I still think a lot of bicyclists ride like ding-dongs, but I also see that it’s often dangerous to be a bicyclist on a road full of cars.

There are some endorsements I regret making, and some people I wish I did endorse but didn’t.

Not that it would have moved the needle at all. But it’s still nice to be on the record about supporting someone or something.

I’ve changed as a person over these 5-plus years, and I hope you have too.

But more importantly, I hope that everyone takes a few minutes every day and reflects on the consequences of being wrong.

Every day, we express hundreds, if not thousands, of opinions. We talk about what we want for lunch, whether or not we liked Movie X and what we thought about Uncle Rob’s most recent problematic meme.

We comment on social media. We complain to our loved ones. And we mumble under our breath. Some of us even wear them on our clothes. I do that every time I wear my MATH hat.

And while most opinions, strictly speaking, are neither right nor wrong, some definitely are.

We may not like it, but we all know deep down that bad conclusions based on worse analysis are simply not valid.

God’s existence isn’t dependent on butts in pews or the number of Darwin bumper stickers on cars. The efficacy of masks is not dependent on public polling. And cancer doesn’t care about what alternative remedy speaks to your soul.

Some things are and other things aren’t.

I think we’d all be better off if we just assumed that at least some of our many opinions were wrong. And we’d all be even better off if we took the responsibility of weighing the possibility of being wrong seriously.

Pick a topic. It doesn’t have to be something big, but it does have to be something with consequences.

What if you hopped in your car, noticed the gas light was on, and said to yourself, “I can make it to the store and just hit up the gas station on my way back.”

What happens if you’re wrong?

Well, it’s been a hot summer. And now you have a week’s worth of groceries in your car going bad as you walk to the gas station with your gas can in hand.

Now let’s up the ante.

Let’s say you’re wrong about police brutality or COVID-19 or something else.

What do all of those posts, all of those discussions, all of those emails to your elected officials add up to? Bad policy? Spreading infection? Tanking the economy?

Every ideology is a collective movement. Do you take the action of joining your movements seriously? When you take a stance that’ll have a real effect on people, do you also take responsibility for the consequences that follow? Or do you take on all of the privileges of pushing the public square in one direction while shirking the responsibility?

As someone who has expressed an inordinate number of opinions over his life already, if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that the consequences of our words matter. There’s a place for anger, snark, hope and humor, but our thoughts, feelings, and opinions come with real consequences.

I’m just afraid that we’ve been ignoring the consequences of our words and movements for too long, and we’ve dug our own grave. Maybe 2020 is just the chickens coming home to roost on this Native American burial ground that we call America?

Maybe it’s time that we all take a step back and think about the unintended consequences of our words.

Either way, I’m too tapped out to write about it anymore.