in recent years the thought about your own opinion got me to thinking and this peice is what came out of it.

This I believe: your voice should be your own.
Do you feel the sense of pride and almost relief whenever you manage to get a unique point of view across? I do. Whenever you open your mouth and allow words to spew out, it is because you personally have something to say that you want to share with the world. Each of our unique individual experiences help mold and shape our voices, be they social, family orientated, societal expectations, the morals and ethics that we are raised with, or our education.
The want to be normal to fit in with society is something that each of us experience. At one point or another probably in our childhood years, we realized we were different, we didn’t belong. Yet we wanted to belong. Walking down the street, you see girls wearing a pink tank top and a mini skirt, taking on their phones and listening to their iPods. You see people labeled as Goths, walking down the street in their dark clothes. And as soon as we see them we have always labeled them into groups hardly ever pausing to think about them as individuals. We strip them of their voice and force them to conform themselves to our own expectations. Another concern is alarming: the loss of the ability to make your own voice unique, especially in the teenage year. The peer pressure to agree with your friends is a truly powerful force and is almost unparalleled in those that affect us throughout our life. People strive to be accepted, to be loved, to be normal. When we try to fit it to normal expectations, we should ask a simple question and think about it: is this really for the best?
Throughout our society, our ethnic background and customs limit our voice – be it the loss of a woman’s voice through her rights or who we are expected to marry. When I ask some of my friends about who they would date, they said right away that they would date an Asian boy. Yet when I asked them why, they replied that it was because of what their family expects them to do. They expect them to fit in, to not go against tradition. For if they dated a boy from any other ethnic background, who could say what their children would believe in? When we are in a family environment, we should feel safe and loved, yet most of only feel that we will be loved if we behave a certain way and do certain things. We limit our voice to meet the standard set by people who we want to please.
We are taught social expectations from an early age and what we are not taught; we stumble upon by trial and error. We are not supposed to be failures, we are not supposed to act a certain way. When we do not conform, we are labeled as rebellious, something that hopefully we will one day grow out of and if not, then we will fill the jails and the streets. We will fill the bars and corners. Is doing what we want and acting out on how we feel such a bad thing? Can we ever truly be alive or have our own voice if we do not? No matter how we turn out, is going in the opposite direction any better than that achieved by fitting in or living up to the expectations of others?
Maybe the other side doesn’t have it easy too. When people conform to society expectations, what is it that we see? We see men going through midlife crises; we see depression and loss of life. So how is conforming to social expectations any better than being ourselves? Is being happy such a crime that we now are not entitled to it on any level? Those that chose their own path feel cursed by society or unacceptably defiant.
Often as I grew up, issues were discussed and I would often hear my peers and even myself talk about the issue within the confines of the expected morals and ethics of our society. I worry sometimes of the consequences when we limit ourselves in our thinking to that of what your friends believe in. One day our individual voices will slowly die and all that would be left is the droning of the masses. For with each child we teach them what is right and what is wrong, we subject each child to our voice while we suppress theirs. Countless times, I have heard and seen a mother embarrassed by what her child said. A child simply asking a question out of honesty, honesty which is lacking in most adults. It is surprising and a little daunting that to be polite in our society that we have to monitor what we say to make sure we don’t offend anyone. Are these morals that we subject children to the right choices? Do we not make mistakes; are we harming them when we are helping them? Do we mold their voices every time we implant a new rule into their impressionable minds?
Words can hurt far worse than any physical blow can hurt. Often, people throw them about in a casual manner, ones not appropriate to be used in an intellectual society. The pain from insult implants itself into our unconscious mind and grows into our insecurities and doubts. So, should we use our voice? Should we be careless with words not even our own, especially when there not our own? We are shaped by what we are taught, but who really controls what we are taught – our families, our friends, and our government. Are people actually intelligent enough to take a step back and actually think about what is that they are being taught to believe? We have seen many cases where we see a herd mentality, Nazi Germany being one of the prominent ones. Is education so important that it controls what we do and say? We repeat often like a parrot what we are taught to believe. To hold our teachers in high regard in our minds, they lose the humanity that is so a part of them, the part that of them that makes mistakes. Is education such a blessing when it strips us of our individuality in forcing us to learn the same things as everyone else? To teach us to think and question in only a certain way? We are all taught to question our government but are we taught to question our schools? Our schools where every child is forced to attend and pay attention, where we can learn to spew back the same information to get a good mark on a test or paper. In a place, where were taught to be careful with our voice and only use it in a certain way.
So can our voices ever truly be our own. Can we actually say what we actually want to without it later being thrown in our face or allow others to look down upon us? Can we look past the hate and bias in our hearts and develop our voice into something that would benefit society and ourselves? With all the pressure that is put upon us by outside forces, will we do what is right or what is easy? And that leads to the question. What will our society be without our voices; will we become the drones of the future? Doomed to walk the land, looking different from the person next to us, yet still the same words spilling out of mouth. With our power taken away, we lose something important: what is more powerful then sharing our opinions?