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It All Starts With Trust

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By Art McNeil

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 11, 2008

A grisly news story concerning the shooting of two teenage girls in Oklahoma recently left me wondering what might have prevented the tragedy. Would alertness to potential dangers in their immediate surroundings have saved them? Perhaps, but what is lost when children are conditioned to see potential harm everywhere? What happens when a society stops trusting?

The town of Weleetka, Okla., has been grappling with this since the unsolved slayings of Taylor Dawn Paschal-Placker, 13, and Skyla Jade Whitaker, 11, who were found shot to death along a rural road. The girls lived in a quiet, rural community where people knew each other and trusted each other. But not anymore - a once tranquil community is now consumed by fear and mistrust.

When tragedies like this don't touch us personally, trust commands very little of our attention, even though it often involves matters of life and death.

For example, we put faith in the weight-bearing capacity of a ladder, assume that fellow drivers will stay in their lane, or that pharmaceutical companies have adequately tested our prescriptions for side effects. Every day without thinking, we place our lives in the hands of unknown chemists, engineers, trades people, and random passersby. Beginning life as one of the planet's most helpless critters, humans are by comparison dependent on parents and other adults for an extended period of time. It is our nature to trust.

A leading psychologist, Jack Gibb, suggested, "Trust creates flow and gentles the mind-body-spirit." The opposite happens when fear replaces trust as the dominant perspective. Harmony between self, others and the environment is destroyed when fear is left unchecked. Individuals and communities regress to a primitive state based on kill or be killed.
Civilized societies must work at fostering trust because fear-based conditioning begets more fear and leads to an increase in violence.

Is the world dangerous? Can people be trusted? Should we try to maintain our childlike trust and help children to do so? Or should we develop caution, be appropriately wary and be realistically prepared for danger?

Danger does exist. People get mugged, women and children are subjected to violence, some companies cheat, and some politicians are dishonest.

How should parents prepare the next generation? Do they teach children to bear arms during a walk? Must we continue advising people to expect evil from strangers, regardless of the statistics that prove most abuse comes from family members and friends?

Society cannot prevent violence but it can select the premise upon which it operates. By choosing not to trust, communities become defensive rather than creative, and they exclude rather than include.

Teaching children to expect safety and protection from the community and then providing law officers with the legislation and tools necessary to get the job done, is a great place to start. Civilized societies, on matters of security, must accept that the needs of many will at times impose on the rights of the few who choose to operate outside of the law.

Trust and fear are contagious. For every community it will be one or the other. Our choices today are shaping the world your children will experience tomorrow.

Art McNeil is an executive coach and CEO think tank facilitator with TEC Florida. He lives in South Tampa.

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