And where do you stand

Most of us are fair weather sailors when it comes to holding opinions. How often we are swayed from our viewpoint by listening to another, possibly diametrically opposed to the one you held a moment ago, before some articulate firebrand comes along and persuades you otherwise.

The power of persuasion using language to "guild the Lilly" is common and says more about us than the person doing the persuading. Perhaps they have a fixed surety in their views but we who bend and sway to opinion have little to say for ourselves. 

Public opinion is often contrived by powerful forces, there is even an argument that public opinion can be harmful to its-self and needs cultivating. I read the other day that public opinion had fallen for the first time below 50% in favour of the death penalty. Can you imagine an opinion so overwhelmingly held, which has been in force for many decades since the death penalty was abolished not finding sufficient support to ensure it became law once again.
The fears of hanging the wrong person put aside, there are clear cases where extra terrible crimes are carried out where the concept of an eye for an eye carries favour with most of us and it is only a minority who argue that we as a society are branded with the same guilt as the criminal who committed the crime in the first place.
In a society which prides its self on having the sensibilities to hold public opinion in sway for the more human view, we are confused when the same established reticence to behave in an inhuman way, sidles up to the most despotic and cruel regimes, regimes who as a matter of course regularly execute their own citizens.
Are we simply duplicitous or, are we persuaded that each to his own ?