Lynch Pen

Trust the government?

It is sometimes very difficult to share one’s thoughts - or opinions in some cases - in a medium such as this newspaper. Whether what one is sharing has meaning to others is always a question that the author must consider. The overriding factor, of course, is that no one is required to read what a person writes.

And, if the editor is gracious and publishes what is submitted and a reader disagrees, the reader can write a letter to the newspaper and express their dissatisfaction.

Having started with that paragraph to justify my contributing to the newspaper, please be aware you might want to censor this if young people in your household read the newspaper from cover to cover as does my wife. This isn’t going to include any pornography - just an observation about a recent survey on Americans’ attitudes toward our government.

When I was in school, we were taught about our government and the establishment of our nation. The great leaders of our early history, the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Hamiltons, etc.

were viewed with reverence in classes and in conversations over the dinner table. Whether George Washington had an axe and actually cut down a cherrytree doesn’t really matter when you are a child and your parents confirm what you are learning about our nation’s history.

Somewhere between the youthful belief and the involvement in the real world, I lost my faith in the people who have followed in our nation’s government leadership roles. The political process may be the best in the world, but some of the people in positions of power are flawed like the rest of us. When money and positions of power are brought together in the hands of persons who are thinking solely of themselves, the outcome can be decisions that lead to the resulting mistrust that surveys are reporting regularly. I certainly fit into the majority who do not trust government to make sound, long-term decisions which will benefit our nation and society.

Over the years we tend to be more pessimistic (I believe) as our experiences reveal that many people have value systems different than our own. My faith in the leaders of our country began to waiver when we went to Vietnamand allowed ourselves to become mired in a hopeless situation. Even then I don’t think we expressed our distrust to our growing sons who were in junior high school. Hopefully we did not convey an attitude about trust to them that would have permanently swayed their views.

Polls today (Pew research Center and CBS polls) indicate that 80 percent of Americans don’t trust our government.

How you word questions in a poll can greatly affect the outcome since it has been proven that a negative response can be interpreted as a positive outcome. But the scary thing to me is the age of distrust is apparently dropping.

In a CBS News Poll, the variation in responses to the question do you “trust the government to do the right thing” between age groups revealed that the 18-29 age group and 65 and over was only marginally different. The younger age group was only slightly more trusting than my age group.

In a graph correlating Trust-Distrust to presidential office holders, recent trust levels peaked in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, went down through the end of the Carter presidency, recovered a bit during Reagan’s term and has only seen the Trust-Distrust level meet (approximately 50 percent in each category) at the end of Clinton’s term before heading down again to the current 80 percent range.

There seems to be some tie to the political party of choice being in power. If you are a Democrat, you might have greater faith in government controlled by the Democrat Party and the same would be true for a Republican, but as we are finding more and more people listing themselves as Independent, we may be less affected by political party labels.

I recently came to the conclusion that the closer I got to the structure of the two main political parties, the less I trusted government. Is it possible others, maybe even you, may have faced the same reality? Unless the political parties seek out candidates who are truly committed to the welfare of our nation rather than the political establishment, can we expect an improvement in this attitude about ‘trust’?

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Editor’s note: Leo Lynch is an award-winning columnist. He is a native of Benton County has deep roots in northwest Arkansas. He is a retired industrial engineer and former Justice of the Peace. He can be contacted at prtnews@nwaonline.

com.

Opinion, Pages 4 on 04/10/2013