Tag: protection

The Paradox of Trust

A friendly face.

It’s a lifeline.

When we’re faced with novelty, a friendly face can make all the difference.

Friendly is familiar. And familiarity can cut through the jitters of uncertainty.

So, we seek out a friendly face at any opportunity. We seek to build a stable of people we can trust.

We believe that we’re setting ourselves up for success by doing this. But we could be booking a one-way ticket to trouble instead.

I’ve often been described as trustworthy.

Many times, I get this feedback directly. Sometimes I see it through the actions of others.

I take this accolade as an honor and a responsibility.

While it’s great to have others believe in me, I know I can’t rest on my laurels. I must work continually to validate that trust.

For trust is not a rubber stamp. It’s a contract.

If I fail to deliver on my end of that contract, it evaporates. I lose the goodwill of family, friends, and associates. And I end up hurt, perhaps irreparably.

And if I abuse the contract entirely — blatantly violating its terms for my own gain — it ignites. I lose the goodwill of family, friends, and associates when the truth comes to light. And they end up hurt, perhaps irreparably.

Yes, what builds us up can also tear us down.

And so, I am deliberate when it comes to trust. I strive to model trustworthy behavior, but I don’t overtly seek out the trust of others.

I simply put myself in a position to earn that label. And once I receive it from someone, I work extra hard to maintain it.

The stakes are too high to act otherwise.

Confidence artists.

We have a complicated relationship with them.

We love it when our favorite characters on the silver screen are putting on a ruse. But we loathe seeing such sequences play out in real life.

The gap between these two examples might seem stark. But they’re closer together than we might want to admit.

Whether it’s James Bond or Bernie Madoff, confidence artists draw from the same well — our sense of trustworthiness, and our unwillingness to question it.

And while it’s easy to trivialize those victimized by confidence schemes — labeling them as the naïve, the uber-rich, or the movie villains who had it coming — such dissonance misses the point.

All too often, we play fast and loose with the concept of trustworthiness. We hand over the keys to the Rolls Royce that is our life. And we just expect the valet in its charge not to go joyriding with it.

We hope that everyone’s better angels will shine through. But what if they don’t?

We have no contingency plan for the devil in our midst. We head out into the chaos of the world without an inch of armor. And the results are predictably tragic.

Perhaps it’s time to change the calculus.

My parents are both educators.

Ever since I was a child, they’ve been entrusted with the well-being of schoolchildren. During the busiest part of the day, they share a classroom – with no parents in sight.

This alone isn’t noteworthy. Or it shouldn’t be.

After all, the school system has been set up this way in America for two centuries. We entrust educators with our kids, no questions asked.

But recently, things have changed.

Revelations of physical abuse in the classroom by teachers have shattered any sense of trust. Schools have had to face tough questions about how they operate.

This has impacted my parents. They’re consummate professionals who have proven worthy of the trust bestowed upon them. But they now face a bevy of regulations and restrictions that impact how they teach.

There’s no question that these changes were needed. The old method of blind trust allowed predators to lie in plain sight, and plenty of lives were ruined in the balance.

Still, the current climate in classrooms isn’t exactly sustainable either. Education can’t happen in a trust vacuum, with all its mechanisms eroded away.

The solution lies somewhere in the middle, in the gray area between carte blanche and a surveillance state.

And it’s there, in the fog and the mist, where the path forward is so difficult to navigate.

Trust but verify.

Back when I worked in television news, I internalized these three words.

Speed was the name of the game. Getting the scoop, being the first to report — that meant everything.

But accuracy was the name of the game too. Putting the wrong information out there could get you in a boatload of trouble.

Choosing between these two edicts wasn’t an option. So, I went with the trust but verify approach.

Essentially, our news operation would implicitly trust the information we came across. But we’d still check with a second source to verify that intel, ensuring it was accurate.

This trust but verify approach speaks to the paradox of trust. We need it, but we can only rely on it so much.

There’s no true guidebook for this paradox. There’s no silver bullet that leverages the upside of trust without exposing us to those nasty downsides.

The best we can do is to approach the situation with eyes wide open. To lean into our vulnerability and to prepare ourselves for the worst outcomes.

We can do this by honoring the trust placed in us. Instead of taking this goodwill for granted, we can act to validate it day in and day out.

And when it comes to the trust we place in others, we can take our time. Instead of diving right in, we can verify that our faith is indeed justified.

On their own, these actions won’t mean much. Trust can still be broken. People can still get burned.

But as more and more of us follow these principles, those risks will diminish. We will bolster our faith in each other while working together to deliver the goods.

That’s a future we can all get behind. But it starts with our actions today.

So, let’s get started.

Shifting Barriers

Barriers can divide us. But they should never define us.

In the summer of 1997, my family took a trip to Washington with my godparents and their son. While we walked the National Mall one late afternoon, my godfather noticed a lost backpack on a park bench.

Since it was the age before cell phones, we took the backpack to our hotel and called the number we found on its ID tag. This allowed us to return the backpack to its rightful owner — a very embarrassed congressional aide.

As a sign of gratitude, the aide arranged a private tour of the U.S. Capitol for us. We took the Congressional Subway from the senate office building to the Capitol itself and got a behind the scenes look at the both chambers of Congress.

Looking back now, 20 years later, this story seems even less real than it did in real time. It would be inconceivable today to pick up a lost backpack from a park bench, let alone bring it back to a hotel in order to locate its rightful owner. And of course, just about no one’s getting a behind-the-scene tour of the Capital these days.

The landscape of this story is frozen in the past, in the same way the old Western tales are eternally tied to a frontier that no longer exists. And while the advancement of technology has certainly played a part in altering our perspective, so have changes in the barriers around us.

***

I have a unique perspective on shifting barriers.

I was born in the fading shadow of the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall fell about a month before my second birthday, and the Cold War mentality everyone had lived with for a generation fell with it.

It was a new era. One filled with seemingly endless optimism.

That optimism flowed all the way down to elementary school classrooms. I remember learning about Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement in Kindergarten. Although the March on Washington was already 30 years in the past by then, my teachers kept talking about how the future was brighter than ever. They kept mentioning that there would be more opportunities and fewer barriers in our way.

And this was largely true. There was plenty of prosperity and innovation in America during the 1990s. We had a budget surplus for a while, and we quickly integrated the Internet into our lifestyles. An era barricaded by conflict, fear and distrust crumbled, with friendship and reconciliation filling its void.

It seemed that divisiveness would permanently become a relic of the past. Then the Twin Towers fell.

As I struggled to pick up the pieces after 9/11 — my innocence shattered and my heart broken — I noticed something different going on around me. The barriers our society had spent a decade tearing down started to appear all over the place once again.

These new barriers were evident at airports, border checkpoints and sports arenas, of course. But you could also see them in more subtle areas — such as attitudes toward minorities or reactions to abandoned backpack on a park bench. As an era of suspicion took hold, the cultural connections we’d worked so hard to build faded to grayscale.

Although the initial shock and horror of America’s darkest day soon subsided, it quickly became clear that these new barriers were here for the long haul. I remember checking in for a flight in Rome in 2004, only to notice a military sharpshooter perched overhead. It was a terrifyingly normal sight — one that reflected how an initial fear of terrorism had evolved into a societal norm.

This is not to say there haven’t been some barrier-smashing changes over the past 15 years. The invention of the smartphone and the election of a black president are testament to that. But still, it’s clear that the openness of the 1990s is as much a relic of the past as the toy in the Cracker Jack box.

The tide is most certainly rolling in.

***

This all begs one big question:

Are barriers a bad thing?

Some would say the answer is a unilateral yes. But I’d beg them to reconsider.

You see, barriers do have their benefits. They can give us privacy in our bedrooms and bathrooms. Or keep convicts away from their potential victims. Or help us define which plot of land is ours.

These are all worthy causes for boundaries. Necessary ones for our well-being and survival. After all, there is a saying that goes, “Those who wish to abolish all barriers have never spent a night in the rain.”

Still, the act of building barriers can quickly become dangerous. And our actions over the past decade or so have certainly crossed that threshold.

For in our quest to block out the danger of our world, we’ve been building a wall around our heart. And spreading seeds of deceit and distrust throughout our society.

Those seeds have grown into weeds now. They’re causing the divisiveness, anger and angst running wild through our society. They’re slowly tearing our society apart.

It’s high time that we cut these weeds down.

Let’s take some responsibility for what we’re doing to ourselves.  Let’s unchain our hearts and learn to trust each other again. Let’s accept hope and shun fear.

In short, let’s start building a more open future.

That’s a shift in barriers we can all get behind.

 

Order Matters

We live in a turbulent era — a time where order has been challenged. And for good reason. Our most fundamental right — the one that allows us to live — has been challenged by some of those sworn to protect it. And all too often, skin color is at the center of these tragic incidents.

As this grave issue has gained notoriety, related ones have come to light as well. We’ve collectively shown outrage at the blatant inequalities of our justice system, reopened discussions as to how we actually view black and white, and mourned disturbing acts of retributive violence that have rocked our communities.

We’re certainly a polarized nation. If you don’t believe that, look at the varying responses to NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s decision not to stand for the national anthem — a protest coined to shed light on race relations. Most of the support for the move has come from the black community; the white community has been much less forgiving.

Situations like these show our nation’s current predicament. We must fix these societal problems — but we need to do this in a unified, orderly fashion. This is a difficult feat, since there’s a crisis in confidence with our system of order at the moment. But it’s something we must pull off— as a world without order is fraught with danger.

***

I understand this as much as anyone. A short time ago, I went to a college football game in Oklahoma with a friend. Our seats were right next to the Oklahoma student section, and we decided to move over five feet and watch the game with the student body. While I was at first apprehensive about standing on the narrow metal bleachers with the student — especially considering it had just rained — I soon found out I had other concerns to contend with.

Shortly after kickoff, I felt something pushing against my back. It turns out the drunk guy behind me had dropped the cap to his pint of Jack Daniels, and he had knocked into me as he clumsily tried to pick it up. Moderately amused, I turned my attention back to the game. But a few minutes later, I found myself in the line of fire again — as the same guy started jawing with someone a row in front of me. As the argument got more and more heated, my focus for the evening drastically changed. I was no longer worried about watching the football game. I was instead worried about leaving the stadium in one piece.

Unfortunately, my fears soon became reality — although not courtesy of Mr. Jack Daniels. A man two rows above me had been trying to start fights all night. Someone finally obliged, shoving him and sending him flying; the man knocked me down a row as he fell, leaving me with a twisted ankle. When I looked up, he was charging through the crowd throwing haymakers.

It was only at this point that police and security showed up. They ultimately decided not to throw anyone out, but most of the troublemakers left on their own accord, as the game had become a blowout.

***

This experience was eye opening for me. A trip to a football game had become Jungle Law, simply because there was no one around to restore order. The situation was incredibly dangerous — although my minor ankle injury appeared to be the extent of the damage.

Take this scenario outside the walls of a football stadium, and the consequences are even more dire. While I certainly believe that Black Lives Matter and absolute power can corrupt absolutely, it’s clear that a complete lack of order is just as lethal as a corrupted system of order — maybe more. For when ill-meaning characters are allowed to run amok, we are all in the crossfire.

So we must not shun order completely. Instead we must work together to improve our system for everyone. We must ensure not only that innocent people are not victimized, but also that actual troublemakers are held accountable.

Restoring our confidence in order is not a black issue, or a white issue. It’s a gray issue.

It’s a challenge that affects all of us, but it’s one we’re compelled to take on directly.

Let us begin.

The Wreckage Of Radical Thinking

These are trying times.

Our way of life is under attack by those we cannot understand, and who refuse to understand us. Undocumented people within our borders cause uncomfortable situations, while a booming international drug business is causing problems on multiple fronts. The color of our skin can be a de facto death sentence in certain encounters with law enforcement. Our rights to self-defense, privacy, speech and religion are threatened by — of all things —our own actions.

These are turbulent times indeed, compounded by our collective difficulty grasping one key concept.

Complex problems can’t be solved by simple solutions.

A concise rational statement. But we seem to have lost all rationality these days, as many are  convinced that by simply removing a set of people from our midst, we’ll make everything better.

It doesn’t work that way. Why? Because no matter how you classify us — black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, cops, businesspeople, journalists — we have rights in this country. We have rights to live and defend ourselves. We have rights to spiritual beliefs and to free expression. We have rights to moments of privacy. We have rights to public safety. And, provided we don’t unduly impinge upon the safety of others, we have a right to freedom.

Change is good. Progress is good. But when radical responses to injustice catch fire, an entire subset of our society is denied these inalienable rights — and everything that we should stand for goes up in flames.

It ain’t progress when we ostracize all law enforcement officers for the abhorrent actions of several bad ones. It ain’t progress when we propose disarming our entire society completely, even in the wake of senseless tragedies. It ain’t progress when we threaten to kick out all the Mexicans, or all the Muslims.

For when we do all this, we succumb to closed-mindedness. We regress into an ugly past where some human beings within our borders were considered three-fifths of a person based on the color of their skin. We open the doors for those with the lethal combination of ultimate power and evil intentions to order a mass exterminations of a subset of our population. We threaten to shun our societal values — the unique mixture of cultural diversity and universal rights that has allowed our culture to transform the world.

So, when it comes to pushing our culture forward in the wake of tragic setbacks, we should not let our emotions goad us into radical decisions. Instead, we should show restraint and take a more moderate, central path toward improvement.

By staying true to who we are, we can ensure that who we will be is so much better.