Blogtrek

Trust

This has become an important topic for me. I feel that I have been let down by people and society all my life. When I was a child, I was promised a future of endless energy because of the discovery of nuclear power. Later on, I was betrayed over and over again by auto repair places who said they repaired my vehicle and then something goes wrong with it again. This built up such a lack of trust in me for car repair places and dealerships that I never voted for anyone who was associated with a car dealership. Nowadays, cellular phone companies are the same way. The promise of being able to call from anywhere is broken; half the time on trips I get cut off, because of lack of a tower. Cellular phones are complicated to use and there is no uniformity in them. You can't trust your phone.

There is also a lack of trust in society, in our corporations, our political leaders, and in our religious leaders. See The Corrosion of Public Trust by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post for a good article on trust. It may be one of the reasons why the stock market is not rising like it should upon recovery from a recession. Who's going to be the next Worldcom? According to Strauss and Howe, authors of "The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy", a lack of trust in public institutions characterizes an Unraveling (Third Turning) and leads ultimately to a Crisis (Fourth Turning). According to them a Fourth Turning will come soon, around 2005. They seem to be on the mark.