It was the spring of 1970. The United States had just announced that it was expanding the war in Vietnam by authorizing bombing campaigns in Cambodia. Campuses across the country erupted in protest. On May 4, four protesting students at Kent State were shot and killed by the state national guard. A nationwide college strike was the response, so students could be freed up from final exams in order to do what they could to end the war.
I attended the student-led meeting in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College, where I was finishing my freshman year. Strategies were presented; rallies were proposed; teach-ins were scheduled. The room was filled with an air of urgency, kindled by a deepening commitment to act.
And I was ambivalent. Up until then I can’t say that I was a supporter of the war, but I had trusted the government’s messaging surrounding it, and the need for America to achieve “peace with honor”, which had been long been then-President Nixon’s mantra. I trusted that. As the meeting broke up, I voiced my ambivalence to some classmates They respectfully listened to my concerns; but when I began repeating the government’s rationale for its actions, one classmate gently but clearly said, “maybe the government isn’t telling the truth.”
That had never occurred to me. I had always had an implicit trust in the rightness of America; that it was always acting in good faith and for what was best in the world. But my classmate’s comments completely reframed my worldview. In some ways it was a conversion experience.
My new perspective came with a deepening commitment to justice and a profound distrust of the government. I began to questions much of the history I had been taught. New doors were being opened, and old doors were being shut.
At some level I think I enjoyed closing doors more than opening them Distrusting government, rebelling against authority came with an exhilarating rush. It was a perverse kind of fun. It was easy, and filled with self righteousness. And so many of us anti-war protesters shared that fun by demeaning and dismissing the gears of government. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”, was another mantra that gained considerable cultural traction.
And that became a problem.
In his 1981 inaugural address, President Ronald famously said, “government isn’t the solution to the problem; government is the problem”, a comment that — intentionally or not, has given birth to several decades of distrust. I would like to think that distrust of the government, which is now primarily coming from the political right, has reached its peak, but I am worried that it is still in crescendo mode. And as I listen to people complain about the elites in government, and insist that elections and courts are rigged, I detect a similar satisfaction in demeaning, dismissing and distrusting the other side.
And that is a problem.
Distrust can be easy to create, but difficult to repair. Trust is rooted in the Latin word fid — from which we get fidelity. It is holding a steadfastness to an idea or belief or purpose. Fido, often caricatured as a dog’s name, refers to the loyalty and trust — the fid — a pet has for its owner.
It is tempting to demean distrust in order to regain it. Building on distrust only leads to resentment which, as one writer puts it, is drinking poison so that someone else will get sick.
I think distrust can only be overcome by building trust. Which is hard, and takes a long time. And requires a combination of faith and hope. Faith and hope not just in one’s own position or belief system, but faith and hope that common ground can be unearthed with those who don’t share our position or belief system. Trust is a gift that we are invited to embrace. It involves fid — a commitment to searching out the giftedness of everyone. Even when, no especially when, we don’t want to.
