Jeff Greenfield is a seasoned political journalist and author, and he shares his belief about the end of trust by Americans in this country’s institutions.
Greenfield has titled his essay “In Nothing We Trust.”
Has the U.S. motto become ‘In Nothing We Trust’?
JEFF GREENFIELD, Journalist:
It’s not exactly breaking the news that we’re entering this political high season in the winter of our discontent.
The polls and the political rhetoric speak to a mood of anger, distrust, even outright betrayal. But take a look beyond the political realm, and you will find something that runs longer than the current campaign, and deeper than politics.
The unhappy fact is that Americans’ trust in just about all our institutions has been in a long, almost unbroken decline. Our trust in government? A Pew Research poll last November found that only 19 percent of us trusted the government to do what was right all or most of the time. That’s close to a historic low.
But the real story here is how long that distrust has been festering. Go back to 1964, when the U.S. was in the midst of a long period of economic growth when the Cold War was easing when a major civil rights bill had just been passed.
Back then, 77 percent trusted the government to do the right thing all or most of the time. A decade later, after a divisive war, racial and generational unrest, a president driven from office in scandal, the number had dropped to 36 percent. And in the four decades since, it has never hit 50 percent, not even in the surge of patriotism after 9/11.
That’s about 40 years’ worth of alienation from the government of, by and for people.
Well, OK, but that’s the government. We are a nation born in revolt, with a permanent skepticism about our leaders. But now look at our feelings about other major institutions, and the picture, painted by a series of Gallup surveys going back decades, finds a disturbingly similar pattern.
Our churches? Two-thirds of us had a lot of trust in our religious institutions back in 1973. Now barely 42 percent do. Banks? Trust has gone from 60 percent back in 1979 to 28 percent now. Our public schools? More than half were trusting at the end of the ’70s. Barely three in 10 are today.
Organized labor? Big business? The medical system? The presidency? All get low grades. And before you ask, 21 percent profess a lot of faith in television news, less than half the percentage that did so little more than 20 years ago.
Other than the military, the police, and small business, no institution commands the trust of a majority of us, and even those are less trusted than they once were.
Well, the question is, why? One obvious answer, there’s a good reason for this mistrust. How confident should we be in banks after the financial meltdown, in our public schools, given the woeful marks our students get compared with other nations, in our religious leaders, given the criminal sexual behavior of those who’ve spoken in God’s name?
But we’re also living in a less innocent time. The press was strictly controlled in World War II. The failures, strategic and moral, in places like Iraq, are on full display. The private lives of politicians, once carefully concealed, are now matters of public speculation.
Movies that celebrated heroes of the church or finance now tell very different stories of greed and sin. And the media messengers who show us the feet of clay on those that stand on the pedestals, well, they are increasingly seen as carriers of a partisan agenda, or guilty of their own failures.
But, deserved or not, the lengthy disaffection that so many feel about so many important parts of our national life clearly puts a heavy burden on anyone asking for the trust of the citizenry. It may, indeed, reward those who seek power, not by offering to ease that disaffection but to feed it.
And it’s worth asking, how does a nation thrive when, year after year, our motto is, in nothing we trust?
Source:>>>>>>>>>>>Here
INTEL AGENCIES EXPOSED. LOOK BELOW
Below, an essay by Francesca Kelley, age 18.
In Nothing We Trust
Like many American children, I have, at one point or another, dabbled in door-to-door sales. I eventually graduated from peddling Girl Scout cookies with my mom to knocking on my neighbors’ doors alone, attempting to lure them into supporting my high school marching band with citrus fruits. However, selling alone, I soon encountered a problem: I knew almost none of them by name. Additionally, even after explaining that I lived just down the block, I often noticed the homeowner eyeing me with suspicion, questioning what business I could possibly have on their front porch.
Gone are the halcyon days of perpetually unlocked doors and packs of unsupervised kids roving the neighborhood. America has entered a new era: the Age of Mistrust. Nowadays, suburban homes are outfitted with security systems fit for federal penitentiaries, and children aren’t allowed out of the house without a chaperone. It is no coincidence that as we have lost trust in those around us, loneliness levels have also been on the rise; whereas between 11 and 20 percent of people frequently felt lonely in the 1970s and 80s, that number is closer to 40 percent today.
Unfortunately, the disease of mistrust hasn’t just been eroding our happiness. The American public is also rapidly losing faith in its most valued institutions. Today, in the country that once considered the newsman Walter Cronkite “the most trusted man in America,” only 32 percent of people have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media. According to the Pew Research Center, an abysmal 19 percent of Americans trust their government. So where did all our trust go, and how do we get it back?
In a bygone America, neighbors relied on each other to watch the kids or borrow some sugar. The moment we started locking our doors was the moment we began to lose faith in what once made our country great. Social scientists have noticed the steady decline in interpersonal trust has led to an inability “to engage in spontaneous, voluntary cooperation.” What it boils down to is this: when someone can’t even trust their neighbor, how can they trust their president or a refugee from a foreign land?
As bleak as the situation may seem, we can learn to trust again. Communities across America demonstrate the possibilities every day, whether by rallying around a local child fighting cancer or organizing a fund-raiser to help feed the homeless. Trust is key; a community can’t unite for the common good without believing in each other.
America has lost its way, but the solution is simple: love thy neighbor.
Source:>>>>>>>>>>>>Here
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. -- Plato (429-347 BC)
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