Who Do You Trust?

I suspect that most people who have supported political candidates or supported people for appointment to some office or commission have done so with their fingers crossed, at least symbolically.

No matter how much you think you know somebody you run the risk that something will happen or will be discovered which makes your support untenable and maybe even ridiculous, which can disillusion you and make you feel betrayed and less likely to support somebody in the future, lest you be burned again.

While many people’s focus of wonderment has been about what kind of prostitute can command a $5,500 fee such as Elliot Spitzer, Governor [for a few more days] of New York, supposedly spent, Leonard Pitts, jr. in a recent column inspired by the situation asks, after listing several instances of similar recent and historical indiscretions with varying degrees of fall from grace, notes

Instead, with an arrogance that beggars description, with a hubris that blots the sun, these men try to game the system. And when it catches up with them, they don't even bear the greatest cost. No, that's borne by wives who must stand, dead-eyed and humiliated, by their sides through the ritual of apology, by children who must go to school the day after, by constituents who believed and now see that belief betrayed.

Do you know how hard it is to believe? To overcome cynicism and inertia and place fragile trust in the hands of someone who claims to represent values higher than expediency and self? Do you have any idea how much of a fool you feel to see that belief, tenderly given, callously trampled? Do you know how much less likely you are ever to give belief again?

And finally, do you know how much it damages us, the larger us, when faith is calcified by cynicism? When we become unable to believe?

And, although the section about family might not be relevant here, you wonder if Lord Fletcher isn’t also feeling a bit of disillusionment.