The fifth or sixth time I read about that Pew poll showing a staggering number of Americans — 78 percent — distrust their government, I began to wonder: Who exactly DO we trust?

Well, there’s always . . . umm.
It is far easier to trust individuals than institutions, and many of the faithful look askance at denominations while still revering their pastors and congregations, the same way that many Americans hate Congress yet like their particular representatives and the jobs they’re doing.

Business? You’d laugh if I said I trust American business. But there are certain businesses I do trust — FexEd, American Taxi, Muller Honda. I trust them because I’ve dealt with them and know they do what they say they’ll do.

The media? Nobody trusts the media, or at least they say they don’t. Once again, everybody’s particular favorites are excluded. The mainstream media is damned in one breath while, in the next, some Fox-fed fact is waved, as if Fox were a pirate radio station and not a huge network owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

Trust builds over time. I used to carefully count every $20 bill spat out by an ATM machine. But after years of ATMs always getting it right, my rigor has relaxed a bit.

Not that trust is always rational. Anyone who steps into a crosswalk without first looking down the street unwittingly puts his life into the hands of a stranger.

Trust is withdrawn just as casually. Consider the railroad tragedy in University Park, where the gates were up and that poor young woman was killed by an Amtrak train. A freakish accident that does not signal a general unreliability of train gates. But I bet for a long time to come, a lot of people will think twice, and look twice, when crossing tracks.

So why don’t we trust the government? Put aside partisanship for a moment. Ignore the sad reality that 40 percent of the country distrusts our government because they believe it is being led by a foreign-born, socialist radical sleeper agent.

The current administration excluded, the highlights of our modern national history do not inspire confidence in government: Vietnam. Watergate. Monica Lewinsky.

Indeed, our notion of history has changed. Once, U.S. history was a thrilling patriotic tale: Washington chopping down the cherry tree and tossing a silver dollar across the Potomac.

Now, it’s a series of crimes, frauds and blunders, beginning with land stolen from Native Americans, passing through slavery and Civil War, and ending with Cold War and economic folly.

How can we trust our government when we’re not the good guys? By the time our kids finish learning about Wounded Knee, the Tuskegee Experiments, the Great Depression and Japanese-American internment camps, it seems they never learn that this is a great country that does good things well, at least occasionally.

Don’t get me wrong. Every tinpot dictatorship can celebrate itself. I’m a fan of warts-and-all history. And frankly, I suspect that this particular era of distrust is not because people know too much, but know too little. Again and again I hear Tea Partiers proudly state they’ve never been involved in politics before, as if prior apathy were a badge of honor and not a mark of shame. Where have you been? Because this is not the first time of crisis.

Distrust can be an important life skill. I’ve been trying to instill a bit more distrust in my boys who, having been raised in the leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook, are laboring under an overly optimistic view of human behavior.

“Put your bike away, someone will steal it if you leave it in the driveway,” I tell my older son, who looks at me incredulously, as if I had just expressed some laughable, exaggerated concern. Steal it? Are you kidding me? (”What do the police in Northbrook do?” my younger son once asked. “Protect us,” I answered. “Protect us from what?” he retorted. “Spiders?”)

I figure, I’m not the Welcome Wagon for disillusionment. Life will manifest its sad realities soon enough.

The question, “Do you trust the government?” is too simplistic and the government too vast. Trust which part to do what? Restore New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? Nope. Refuse to cave in to special interests? Not a chance.

But I still filled out the census form. I still vote. The military seems to work. The highway department. Social Security is running out of money, but still functions.

The poll is not without its bright spots. A surprising 89 percent have a positive view of the postal service, 79 percent approve of the job the Centers for Disease Control is doing, with similarly high marks for NASA, the Defense Department and the Food and Drug Administration.

The people in this poll seem to think the answer to untrustworthy government is to have less of it. But that is only one answer. Demanding more trustworthiness is the second, more difficult approach. It involves getting involved — voting, running for office, learning, doing. You can’t blame the media — we expose the corrupt, you grin and vote them back in anyway. Complaining is not the path of the hero; fixing the problem is.

Have PoliticalMavens.com delivered to your inbox in a daily digest by clicking here