“I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.” Douglas Adams
The Language of Trust, Michael Maslansky with Scott West, Gary DeMoss, and David Saylor:
RIP
Americans’ Trust in America
1776 – 2008
“Imagine, for a moment, an America where a controversial foreign war has been dragging on for five years, costing countless billions of dollars and thousand of American lives.
Imagine an America where half the people distrust and resent the current president, and the other half distrust and resent the charismatic young man destined to replace him.
Imagine corporate CEOs so detached from reality they take private jets to congressional hearings to govel for taxpayer bailouts.
Imagine the world’s biggest and most trusted banks and investment firms casually and irresponsibly gambling away people’s entire life savings in pursuit of their next quarterly bonuses.
Imagine some of the most trusted political, business, economic, and community leaders in this country exposed as incompetent, or worse, cheats and liars.
And while this country has gone through wars, economic meltdowns, and crises of confidence in the past, imagine all of this occurring amid an environment that has in many ways abandoned the very means people would traditionally use to understand and process what’s going on, amid a media landscape transformed over the past twenty years by a thousandfold explosion of channels, voices, and opinions and the proliferation of the Internet and blogosphere, amid a radically new reality in which the cultural authority and moderating force of the traditional mass media have been replaced by a self-service, do-it-yourself system in which people are on their own to seek out information and judge its credibility.
Welcome to 2008, the year trust finally died in America.”
I believe we live in the best of times. Why? It’s high time we realize we are sick so we can get better. It’s like the alcholic coming to the realization: “My name is____, and I’m an Alcholic.” Many of us have wondered for years but we don’t wonder any more.
