Macomb, IL – Dear Russell:
As someone who rolled and totaled our car on Christmas Eve, I offer the following advice knowing it might be taken with a grain of salt. Still: For every 10 miles per hour your car's moving, you should leave at least one car length between you and anyone ahead of you. (And text after you stop, not en route.)
Trust me. True, my wreck had nothing to do with texting or other vehicles since none were around the icy roads that day. But after Mom and I climbed out of the upended Jeep, I thought it wouldn't hurt to remind you. Again, trust me.
Trust seems in short supply these days, I know, between business and government, Wall Street and Gov. Blagojevich seemingly betraying people's trust.
In this, my 15th annual New Year's letter to you - as you wait to hear about your applications to law schools - I wanted to try to stand up for trusting folks. After all, these days trust seems about as rare as basketball coaches who don't scream at their own players.
Take Bernard Madoff (please). He's the investment adviser - and former head of NASDAQ - who apparently deceived people who trusted him, costing them millions of dollars. And this alleged Ponzi scheme was on top of the "routine" shenanigans from which Wall Street's financial sector had to be rescued by the rest of us. Maybe some good could come from Madoff toying with others' trust.
Discussing Madoff, real estate and media mogul and philanthropist Mort Zuckerman told Business Week magazine, "This shadow banking system of money-market funds, investment funds, private equity funds, and hedge funds that has been largely unregulated - that is no longer going to be possible."
Others think that recovering balance in business or government or culture itself requires restoring trust to institutions, to society - and that needs more than reinstating common-sense codes of conduct.
Chicago theologian Martin Marty, author of the forthcoming book Building Cultures of Trust, written in cooperation with the State University of New York-Stony Brook's Trust Institute, writes, "The witness to broken trust is so vast and deep that to avoid it would be irresponsible.
"People in many disciplines need to speak up, and they are doing so," Marty adds. Indeed, victims of such betrayal aren't suffering in silence any longer, whether it's objecting to "pay to play" politics, greedy and harmful corporate actions, or sinister breaches of trust by those who use the name of God to hurt others.
Speaking up - especially for others - is one aspect of the profession and practice of law, of course. The law can be about contracts, justice or many ways to agree to live. And its use of reasoning and various proofs can be preferable to quasi-legal methods, like labor negotiations. There, bargaining runs the gamut on trust, from different interests coming to appreciate others' perspectives on the one hand, to everyone lying on the other.
However, standing up doesn't have to mean surrendering the impulse to trust.
Civilization can't let fools destroy people's mutual trust.
As St. Paul writes in First Thessalonians, "Do not quench the Spirit Test everything; retain what is good."
This weekend was Epiphany and a few days ago scientists added a "leap second" to the planet's atomic clock - two examples of trust. The Magi trusted in their readings of the stars to visit a humble birth in a small town, miles from their kingdoms. Regular people trust the National Institute of Standards and Technology to adjust the world's time to reconcile our calendars and clocks to be accurate.
If you go to law school, you may learn to rely almost exclusively on evidence. But don't ignore your heart.
The opposite of trust is skepticism, which can become cynicism.
Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, "When one admits that nothing is certain, one must also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. There are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would be totally barren and completely useless."
So, treasure trust, in others and yourself.
It's better to be disappointed or even hurt once in a while than to be isolated or suspicious.
Give others some credit, the benefit of the doubt, and your trust. It'll be worth it. Trust me.
Love,
Dad