Trust

 Abe Lincoln was considered quite a story teller and one of those brings up his description of the United States in the condition in which he found the country....that is, a collection of two kinds of states...those states who allow the ownership of slaves and those who don't allow slavery.  He said (approximately)  "it's not quite one thing, and not quite another."  Since Abe's time, the race question has undergone a long and very gradual transition, mostly for the better, but the past 20 years have seen increasing political and social division that threatens to split this country, if not as violently, certainly as thoroughly, as did the question of race.

When I was a kid, I always had the sense that my dad trusted about everyone and everything.  He trusted the people around him, he trusted people in business, and he trusted the people in government.  He trusted the products he bought, the food he ate, and society in general to be a Good Place.  While he wasn't particularly gullible, or any more so than many small town people of the era, it just seemed that he didn't want to be bothered with doing a lot of Mis-trusting.  Being mistrustful consumes energy and really doesn't add much to the enjoyment of life.

Fast-Forward to today....it seems that mistrust is pretty much the order of the day.  Sure, we still trust most of the people we know, but the past several years seem to have seen an explosion of mistrust.  The list is fairly extensive and includes a lot of entities and people who were on our list of Most Trusted.  And it can be quite confusing to sort it all out.

A few generalizations and contradictions.  We mostly trust our personal doctors, but distrust, thanks to CoVid, the CDC, the WHO, any government medical officer, CoVid vaccinations, the medical establishment in general and, by extension, a lot of the people who don't feel as we do.  We mostly trust the politicians we think are on the right side of the fence, but distrust every one of them who seem to disagree with us....and, by extension, a lot of the people who don't feel as we do.  Some of us trust the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the mining companies, the food industry and the financial system as providers of a huge share of jobs and the infrastructure of modern society, while just as many of us distrust them as major contributors to everything from addiction to pollution and environmental degradation to the lopsided political and economic structure that is fueling even more mutual distrust.

It's been suggested that I suffer from the fallacy of "things used to be a lot better".  I don't think that's true because I'm fully aware that many things Are better, but I'm also quite aware that some things are Not as good as they used to be.  I'm even aware that many of the things I think are Worse would be called Better by a lot of people.  Going into listings of such things would take too much time and belabor the point,  The point is that until we try to tackle the issue of trust, we won't be moving in a positive direction any time soon.