When I was a kid growing up in Ohio, I used to hear news reports about the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching on fire. I had never seen any pictures of this event, and for some reason, I always assumed it was kind of like one of those brandy-based flambé dishes you get in fancy restaurants, you know, with a little bit of blue flame kind of flickering over the surface here and there. After all, how much “fire” can you get from a river? Well, actually . . .
I hope the Cleveland newspaper that owns this doesn’t mind my using this picture. This was not some flickering flame over the surface; this was like a full out pile-of-used-tires conflagration. Unbelievable.
No pun intended, the Cuyahoga River fires were a watershed moment in the environmental movement. After decades of politely tolerating and ignoring the dumping of this toxic industrial sludge, we eventually passed laws like the clean water act, making it illegal (or at least harder) to dump all these nasty flammable chemicals into the public waterways. Yay.
But nowadays, there is a different kind of pollution in our midst. It catches fire, not in the river, but in our hearts. It is the pollution of mistrust.
No matter where you look these days, you will hear about something that will corrode your general sense of trust. It may be in the nightly crime dramas (where graphic depictions of mutilated corpses and their psychopathic killers abound), it may be found in the nightly news (and their emphasis on the biggest crime/trust violation of the day), it may be found in rap music, in political campaign ads, or some strident talk radio show . . . no matter, you don’t have to work very hard to hear someone in our midst who is getting attention, selling advertising, or promoting their agenda, not by making any cogent argument, but just by telling you that somebody, somewhere, is not to be trusted.
In writing “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid,” one of the biggest things I discovered about the differences between poor kids and rich kids was, rich people have trust, and poor kids don’t.
The freedom to pollute the environment once enriched a few people, but impoverished the rest of us. The freedom to pollute the public discourse and our collective “emotion-ment” with nonstop messages of mistrust similarly enriches some, but impoverishes the rest of us.
I am not suggesting that we become naive children, but there is massive difference between measured amounts of trust and a total lack of it. A total lack of trust ultimately creates poverty. Just one example: Dollars have no intrinsic value; their value is based solely on our collective trust in the federal government. So every time someone tells you not to trust the government on general principles, they are doing something that directly threatens the value of the money in your savings account.
© Justin Locke
