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It seems to be everywhere you look, across the political spectrum. Far too many people don’t believe in anything anymore. They’ve lost faith in everything: our institutions, our values, and even each other. We’ve become a country of cynics.
One of the first posts I saw this morning on social media was about a well-documented instance where a Minnesota family’s six children were hospitalized after their minivan filled with smoke and tear gas fired by federal agents. Below the news report, someone had dismissed it in the comments: “I don’t believe it.” That was it. No explanation, nothing that cast doubt on the reporting. Just a rejection.
A little bit further down, someone had written about diminishing confidence in the Justice Department. A commentator wrote, “Did anyone believe in that anyway?”
We have become a nation of skeptics, of cynics. We are jaded. It’s all around us.
In her essay, Truth and Politics, Hannah Arendt wrote, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”
The President spews lies so constantly and so casually that it’s easy to understand how people can lose their bearings. It’s an assumption that Trump lies, not something unusual. That’s the President of the United States!
One manifestation of the lies we’ve become so inured to is the destruction of confidence in our elections. Trump has lied for so long about voter fraud, about non-citizens voting (the evidence does not back that claim up), about voting machines, about stolen elections, that it has permeated the national consciousness and even when people see through the lies, a miasma of distrust for the entire process remains. And of course, it’s not just elections.
Who benefits from a loss of faith in our institutions and in our ability to come out on the other end of this national nightmare with an intact republic? It’s not hard to see. It’s the man who enjoys upsetting the balance of power guarded by NATO because he wants to own Greenland. The man who tears down the East Wing. The man who won’t release the Epstein Files.
At this stage, Trump no longer cares if people believe his lies. He just needs the chaos they generate and the absence of shared truths, shared facts, in our country. People who can no longer discern what’s true from what’s false lose their moral compasses, like the agents who are now shooting at the people they took an oath to protect and serve. It all benefits a leader who wants to take authoritarian control of a democracy.
Giving up your belief in how things should be is dangerous.
I’m not suggesting everyone should have blind faith in our institutions, far from it at this point. But we need to be aware of what’s broken and needs mending without getting stuck on it. Instead of succumbing to cynicism, let’s stay focused on what we can do, even the small things.
Be kind, share joy. Register to vote and make sure everyone around you does, too. We know what this is going to take, but we have to stop the spread of cynicism around us. We’ve come too far in the last year to accept Trump’s success as inevitable.
In the coming week, we will mark the one-year anniversary of the second Trump administration. Find your own way to protest it. Donate to a food bank. Help a neighbor out, or help someone you’ve never met but have empathy for. Sign up to work at a polling place, or decide to run for office. There is so much that we can do. What we cannot afford to do is to let a man who thinks of no one but himself win.
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This year is the 250th anniversary of our country's founding. In the Declaration of Independence, wise men wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As wise people, we understand how important these words are; they are not just words children memorize and recite. Let’s make them our living, breathing truth as we watch what’s happening in Minneapolis and elsewhere. Let’s gently remind the cynics of what’s possible and get them off of the sidelines, where they are dragging others down. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
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