I was not promised. No neighbor ever said “I promise to respect your liberty, because it is my own I defend when I do so, and I understand what it means to make that promise.” No shopkeeper declared “I have given deep thought to what creates and sustains peace and prosperity, and understand that the fabric of spontaneous order is woven from the warp of trust and the weft of honor.”
No family member ever said, “I know that the propaganda-and-power machine thrives on fear, so I will be alert for the ways in which it seeks to polarize us and rip us away from each other, in order that I do not succumb to such thinking.”
Those promises were not made. If I’m honest with myself, they weren’t even implied.
Much is made of the broken trust of government-and-adjacent agencies. But that’s only betrayal if you trusted them in the first place. Even a cursory perusal of the history of that cancerous blight will reveal enough obvious malfeasance, and outright malice, to demonstrate the gullibility of assuming integrity and honesty there.
So it is not the Tower and the Mouth of the Mordor-machine that betrayed me, either. Spoken promises from such outlets mean nothing.
No, it was the actions of every day people of my community, with whom I believed I shared certain important common values, that elicited so much shock and pain.
But was it betrayal? Did anyone, whom I trusted, lie?
When I got married, I wanted John to buy a tuxedo because we were the first of all our peers and siblings, and I figured he would need to be in at least a few weddings. Excluding my own, there have been six family weddings in my adult life: my sister, my two brothers-in-law, two of my cousins, and my aunt.
Of the six, I was only able to attend my sister’s.
I was in the hospital for one, another was too far away, one was too small and I didn’t make the cut, one had to be truncated to a tiny family ceremony during the early days of the Covid hysteria.
For sale: used tuxedo, excellent condition.
And one was the summer of 2021, when everyone was healthy, and everything was open, and I had a hotel room, a gift, and travel plans. But that August, the neurocrats whipped themselves into another frenzy, and my cousin Covid-restricted his wedding. If I wanted to go, I had two choices: I could submit to a toxic injection (with a particular affinity for damaging the heart, an organ that was already damaged once due to chemotherapy), or I could spend two weeks at home in “quarantine.”
I said no. (A year later, at my grandmother’s memorial service, one family member was too anxious to sit near me outside because I was deficient in mRNA shots, and another refused to hug me).
No one promised. I was not betrayed.
While both situations elicited anger, I found it easy to forgive the people involved; they are susceptible to the fear campaigns and, fortunately, didn’t make an issue of the disagreement. As I’ve written before, the price to me of staying mad is much too high; I gain no real benefit from carrying around resentment and anger.
However, as I wrote in my recent essay on forgiveness, to forgive does not mean to forget, or to continue to put myself the same situations repeatedly. In the case of the client who didn’t pay me, I needed to let go of the story that it should have been otherwise, but I also needed to put down that client forever.
The first time Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown, he’s been deceived. After that, he’s a fool, and needs to take responsibility. No one thinks of Charlie Brown as a hero in the football scenario.
Forgiveness is not the hard part. It is the balm for anger.
Trust, broken, is not mended by the act of forgiveness. My trust in you is a gift, an offering, as is your trust in me. The road back from a broken faith is long and arduous; I’d be a fool to embark on it without caution.
The hard part is to trust again. For trust is the balm for fear, but betrayal is devastating. We stay mad to protect ourselves from fear. Once we confront the fear, the bottom falls out. But whom to trust, and when, and how far?
Our communities, large and small, run on trust. If you want to see what happens when that’s lost, study societies under communist regimes: the Soviets under Stalin, the Chinese under Mao. When a 13 year old child becomes a hero for denouncing his father, when neighbors inform on each other, when “See something, say something” gets taken to its full and absurd extreme, you don’t have communities anymore. And without communities, cultures die, and people wither.
The stories we are told, and tell ourselves, become the templates for our lives. When reality departs from the story, whether by explicit deception or the susceptibility of the human psyche, we feel pain, until we recognize that we have a choice. When we acknowledge that our story is wrong, we can change it, or seek environments where it is true.
In the moment when we have experienced something as abuse, what follows? We must decide: do I stay here and continue to be hurt, or do I leave? But until I let go of the story that anything should have been other than it was (it may have been wrong, but it happened), I become the agent of abuse against myself, reliving the pain of the experience and the pain of conflicting with reality. To disengage from that endless cycle is to be free.
I’m quick to forgive, but I am slow to trust again.
And yet, to function in the world, to give and to receive, requires that I must.
I, like Charlie Brown, believed that in this time, in this place, it would be different. I didn’t understand that obeisance to totalitarianism creeps up behind you; no one goes door-to-door getting signatures on the petition. You wake up one day and realize that staying in the herd is more important to most people than asking whether the conduct of the blob is ethical or just.
And so, here I am, asking myself, what does it mean, and what does it take, to trust again? And whom, and how far?
As I sat down to write this piece, I realized that I needed to write it because I didn’t know the answer, and I still don’t. All I have is a place to start, and I will leave you with that today:
How deeply do I trust myself, and how do I know when I am trustworthy?
I am reminded of the old adage; "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Old adages retain currency because we are essentially the same human beings as the wise ones who uttered them first. We are using this one to try to help a 6 year old great-grandson, nicknamed Chuck, deal with his older sister's Lucy bullying instead of whining. We're hoping the lesson takes before he becomes an adult and should be expected to accept responsibility.
"You wake up one day and realize that staying in the herd is more important to most people than asking whether the conduct of the blob is ethical or just."
:applause: