Trust-Fall

For the friend who still believes

Let’s say she’s married. Been with the same dude for most of her adult life.

Let’s say I ask, “Do you trust him?”

She responds, “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

I say, “Didn’t he pretend to like your friends, but then you found out he was trash-talking them behind their backs?”

She says, “Yeah.”

“And didn’t he keep maxing out your credit cards buying stuff you told him you didn’t want him to buy?”

“That’s right.”

“And I seem to recall that he got into a fistfight with your mom and said that she started it.”

“True.”

“And didn’t he keep feeding your kids garbage food even though you told him to stop?”

“Oh yeah.”

“And nothing you said made any difference?”

“Sure.”

“And what about your kid’s kindergarten teacher? Didn’t you find out that he had sex with her? And lied about it for years, until the teacher told you the truth?”

She stares at me. “What’s your point? That’s all in the past.”

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Here we are, friends. Except that the dude we’re all married to is the United States government.

How do I know? Because I’ve been married to the same dude, too. Yeah, I knew he’d instigated violent takeovers, I knew he’d initiated false flag incidents, I knew he’d used my tax money for things I and everyone else abhorred, and I knew he had lied — about all manner of heinous acts, but most egregiously, about harming huge swaths of people here and abroad.

I knew all of that, and yet… if you had asked me four years ago, “do you generally trust the USA?” I’m sorry to say, I would have said yes.

Sad, but true.

Four years ago, I knew about the Gulf of Tonkin. I knew that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone. I knew that G.W. Bush and his ilk lied throughout 2002 about weapons of mass destruction. Blah blah blah, lies and more lies. I could list so very many.

All those lies — all real, all proven — made me cynical, but they weren’t enough to convince me that Uncle Sam didn’t deserve my trust.

I’d even had personal experiences that should have slapped me upside the head, but somehow, they weren’t enough either.

The most significant one occurred in 2001, when “the officials” at ground zero told my husband Peter to go back to work on Wall Street, that the air was safe to breathe four days after 9/11… and he was diagnosed with leukemia two years later.

The least significant one happened in 2019, when I opted for a pat-down instead of walking through a high-tech screener at a Scotland airport. The security agent pulled me aside and whispered in his brogue, “I doon’t blame ya. This one’s alright, but those backscatter’s ya got in yer country… no, thank yoo very much. You’re dooin’ the right thing.”

It didn’t matter. I still wanted to believe in the goodness of the U.S. government, just as a misled child clings to her belief in Santa Claus. I didn’t want to give it up, because I was confused and afraid. What would happen if I believed that usa.gov was not looking out for my best interests? How could I still live here? How could I still retain any shred of optimism, of idealism?

I hear this all the time, from friends and relations: “I couldn't live thinking like that.”

I thought that, too.

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Let’s return to the fictional interrogated woman. Her problem is that she loves her husband, which in itself is a wonderful thing. But that love moves her to believe that all his awful acts in the past shouldn’t diminish her love or her trust in him now.

There’s a reason they say love is blind.

I was raised to love my country. I said the pledge of allegiance, I sang the national anthem, I believed every word in every textbook that public school teachers placed in front of me… why wouldn’t I?

My country, I was told, was the very best on the planet. We always fight for democracy, we are a beacon of integrity and goodness and truth. We are the good guys, the heroes, the saviors.

My love for the USA was blind.

When I look back on former me, I have compassion for her, just as I have compassion for the interrogated woman. What if she was told, from her first breath, by everyone she trusted, that her husband-to-be was an honorable, decent man? How could she hold that image of honor and goodness in her consciousness alongside an image of deceit and mal-intent? She couldn’t.

(I have to take a moment to acknowledge “MALINTENT,” the covert surveillance technology that began testing 15 years ago by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to detect “potential terrorists” by secretly monitoring their video images, audio recordings, cardiovascular signals, pheromones, electrodermal activity, and respiratory measurements.

Let’s just admire, shall we, the frightening irony of an inveterate liar employing a tool to gauge the trustworthiness of everyone else. Breathtaking.)

George MacDonald, mentor of C.S. Lewis and a pioneer in the field of modern fantasy literature, wrote in 1864,

“…it would be wicked to write a tale representing a man called good as always doing bad things.”

It would be wicked. It is wicked.

Living with “a man called good” who does bad things creates cognitive dissonance, the icky feeling you get when you try to hold contradicting beliefs: “My husband is a good man who loves me” versus “my husband is a liar who doesn’t care about me.”

“Icky” is a vast understatement. Cognitive dissonance is so disturbing that most people don’t put up with it for long. They either change their mindsets in one way or another to reconcile those opposites — a rarity — or they dig into one belief even deeper.

We’ve seen cognitive dissonance writ large ever since covid hit the stage in 2020.

To wit:

“Heaven’s Gate [an American religious cult whose members committed mass suicide in 1997] followers had a tragically misguided conviction, but it is an example, albeit extreme, of cognitive dissonance, the motivational mechanism that underlies the reluctance to admit mistakes or accept scientific findings—even when those findings can save our lives. This dynamic is playing out during the pandemic among the many people who refuse to wear masks or practice social distancing. Human beings are deeply unwilling to change their minds. And when the facts clash with their preexisting convictions, some people would sooner jeopardize their health and everyone else’s than accept new information or admit to being wrong.” (The Atlantic, July 12, 2020, Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris)

Wow. I wonder if the authors of that article have changed their minds, given the new information that has come to light since then.

“Trust in the government is at an all-time low,” I hear often, almost as often as I hear “How can so many people still trust the government?”

Both sides are correct, because each one is articulating one half of society’s cognitive dissonance. Just as our nation has experienced unresolved trauma (the murders of J.F.K., R.F.K., and Martin Luther King all qualify, as does 9/11), it is experiencing the collective discomfort that comes with being subjected to gaslighting on an inconceivable scale.

In the case of the interrogated woman, she has to choose one side or the other to dig into more deeply: my husband is a liar vs. my husband is trustworthy. She will also have to stop hanging out with her pesky friend (the equivalent of covering her ears and singing loudly) to prevent more cognitive dissonance.

That’s where I was at the start of covid. My husband was the pesky friend, and I was in denial, my hands solidly over my ears. “Let’s not talk about it,” was my go-to response when he would bring up yet another excellent point.

But things weren’t adding up, and I couldn’t ignore the cognitive dissonance creeping in when I compared what I knew with what I was being told.

The real turning point for me, the point at which the discomfort exploded into full-blown distress, was the government’s insistence that babies and children get the covid vaccine.

It made no sense. Babies and children? They were at almost zero risk. Why would my government do such a thing? I scrambled for answers (incompetence? ignorance? misguided solicitude?) but none of them held water, ramping up my cognitive dissonance to a Spinal Tap 11. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

Who, really, am I married to? came the metaphorical question, and in the asking, a trapdoor fell out from underneath me, pitching me into an entirely different universe, one that included oh my god, maybe I’m married to a psychopath that is not to be trusted.

Finally releasing that long-held, self-blinkered, childlike desire to cling to denial was scary, and I was in free-fall for a while… but eventually, I landed in new territory where seeing what’s real — as bitter and disappointing as it was — had a beauty that’s hard to describe.

My best analogy is this: it was like finally moving out of a house that no matter how many lamps you turn on, or how many curtains you throw open, just doesn’t have enough light. The house may have everything else you need — handsome woodwork, adequate room, water that flows out of shiny faucets — but you squint to see your surroundings clearly.

In the dimness, large things grow too large and scare you unnecessarily, while small, vital objects disappear completely. Your concept of what is real is tenuous, because your faith in your perception is shaky. You’ve been telling yourself it’s okay when deep down you know it’s not, and living like that for too long messes with your trust in yourself.

Walking out of a house like that is the relief of leaving an abusive relationship. The light of the sun finally surrounds you and freedom sweeps through you: no more lies. No more gaslighting. You can see clearly for the first time in years. You know what is real.

The glitch in this “untrustworthy mate” comparison is that if we follow it to its logical conclusion, we should all just get in boats and row far, far away from the shores of the United States — to where, I have no idea. Years ago I thought Costa Rica was the answer. These days, I have a different response.

I can still live here. I want to still live here, because I’ve realized I can still love this country — the beauty of its natural wonders, the goodness of so many of its citizens, the genius of its founding documents — while chewing carefully every word the government, academia, the mainstream media, institutionalized medicine, and science says. It takes longer than gulping down Information Smoothies, but that’s the price you pay to make sure you don’t swallow poison.

It’s laborious, but oddly freeing. That’s part of the beauty I described earlier. With more light to see with and solid ground to stand upon, trust in one’s own intuitive powers to discern truth from falsehood, or fantasy from reality, just grows and grows.

I “trust” we’re all familiar with a trust-fall exercise, where you turn your back, close your eyes, and let yourself be caught by another human being (or beings) standing behind you who have promised they will catch you.

I’ll never again in this lifetime trust-fall into the arms of the government, no matter how many times I hear him purr, “I’ve changed, baby! All that stuff is in the past!”

Now I subscribe to this gem from

el gato malo

: “a lack of trust in government is not a bug, it’s a feature.” Fully accepting the perfidy of Uncle Sam makes my optimism all the more buoyant, because it can leap from a solid foundation of what’s real, not from some squishy wishlist. The most potent idealism is always grounded in reality.

If I were to ask you, “Who is standing behind you?” what would you say? Or would you find a new friend who doesn’t ask such pesky questions?

When I look behind me, I see my own intuition smiling back at me. Her arms are open. “I’ll catch you,” she says, “I’ll always be here.”

I also see other Apocaloptimists at the ready.

I’m in good hands.

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Thank you for being here!

Where are you in your own trust journey?

Have a friend who might benefit from reading this?

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As always, keep your light shining bright.
xox
M