Gut Check
By Pat Nobbie, PhD, Mia's Mom
For four decades, a gut-level ingredient of democracy – trust in the other fellow – has been quietly draining away."
This statement is from a story the AP released on the declining levels of trust among Americans. In a recent survey, only a third of respondents said they trusted "most people," down from 50% in 1972. More disturbing was that younger people expressed more
distrust toward people than their older fellow Americans. Levels of trust do tend to increase with age, but according to the article, each generation since the birth of the baby boomers has started adulthood with less trust than the generation before them. And, the level of mistrust among twenty-somethings is unlikely to change over the course of their lives.
The article mentions several possible causes; decline in "social capital," first documented by Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone," which describes increasing isolation and declining engagement in community-oriented endeavors, a widening gap in economic opportunity, 24-hour news cycles, random violence, the impact of individual technology devices, etc. For whatever reasons, we're less trusting and political and social scientists are worried.
"Social trust" supports a society where it's easier to compromise, "where people are willing to work with those who are different from them for the common good." Trust appears to promote economic growth. "Distrust, on the other hand, seems to encourage corruption. At the least, it diverts energy to counting change, drawing up 100-page legal contracts and building gated communities," according to the author.
The implications of this phenomenon had me thinking about the work the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities (GCDD) is doing in its Real Communities Initiatives. For Real Communities to succeed, trust needs to be nurtured on several levels – between different groups of citizens in each community, between community leaders and members and between GCDD staff and the community. By creating a foundation of trust, communities of people who had never thought to work together before reach across cultural, linguistic, racial and disability-prescribed boundaries to achieve a common goal. They're beginning to trust that their mutual work and relationships can result in an outcome bigger than the sum of their individual contributions.
I believe that a sense of personal power and self-determination in the political arena as expressed through voting is also impacted by the development of trust in a community. If we trust that our political engagement can affect change, are we more likely to vote, join boards, run for office?
On a personal level, I know trust is related to safety for Mia, and all the people like her who we are trying to support in community. We've always said the best hedge against abuse and neglect are the friends and neighbors who know you and the places you frequent where you will be missed. For me, Mia's many social circles are my eyes and ears while I'm in DC. All the ways we can engage young people through employment, membership, peer support and encouraging them to vote, are the ways we build our safety net for a more trusting society. The fate of social trust is in each of our hands.
