Like a lot of ISU students, I spent my summer on an internship out of town. Over the last four years, I’ve become quite attached to this school and this town, not to mention the friends I’ve made along the way.

In my quest to keep in touch with Ames and Iowa State, I got into the habit of pulling up the Daily online edition on Tuesday and Thursday mornings for a few minutes on my computer at work. Accompanying most of the stories and columns was the reader “feedback.”

This essentially allowed the readers to comment on the piece in question on an online bulletin board, which ultimately led to a lot of discussions (in which I was often involved) about a lot of different issues. Unfortunately, at some point during the summer, some user(s) decided to abuse this concept by posting inappropriate responses and often just plain gibberish on the boards. This of course, compelled the Daily to eliminate the feedback boards.

I have to believe that whoever decided to abuse the feedback board couldn’t possibly have any genuine respect for the value of opinions.

And as much as we hear people talk about the First Amendment, I think that it’s taken for granted way too often.

I’ve been fortunate (unfortunate) enough to have grown up in a country ruled by military dictatorship, so I’ve seen restriction of free speech in action, and it’s an ugly thing. I’ve seen journalists thrown in jail on trumped up “coup attempt” charges, simply because they openly advocated democracy. I’ve watched a Nobel Laureate get driven into exile for the same reason.

More personally, I remember the night my dad had to go into hiding for a weekend, for fear that the secret police would come looking for him. Why? Well, he’s a college professor who happened to be one of the leaders of an organization that openly challenged the dictatorship to quit siphoning money into their private coffers, and spend some of it on education. But I guess dictators tend to frown on that a little.

So what’s my point? My point is that we can’t afford to lose sight of how important it is to maintain the value of opinions.

We all need to remember that even when they’re not backed by 100 pages of statistics, every opinion is valid, and deserves to be heard. I’d be the last person to ask people to embrace all opinions, but it’s really important to learn to live with them.

To paraphrase from the movie “The American President”, sometimes we have to stand by and listen to people whose very opinions make our blood boil. And yet we learn to deal with it – all we can do is present our own opinions.

If I can’t give another person a chance to express their views, I might as well throw mine into the Niger River (and if you know where that is, you’re probably better at world geography than most).

I think the surest way to mental decay is to keep a closed mind.

Expression of opinions is protected just as much as any other form of expression and the First Amendment doesn’t restrict that freedom to scientific facts, which means that any idea, however outlandish, gets to be heard.

We can learn to live with that, or risk letting our closed minds be the dictatorship that restricts our freedom of expression. And that, by the way, is just my opinion.

Emeka Anyanwu is a senior in electrical engineering from Ames.