Emily Hoeven | Trust fall

Growing Pains | On balancing cynicism and faith

By Emily Hoeven 02/08/16 9:33pm

My roommate and I were walking to a restaurant downtown for Restaurant Week when a man suddenly popped out from the row of cars parked alongside the street. He was breathing heavily and appeared to be incredibly distraught. My roommate and I jumped backwards, taken aback by his unexpected appearance. “Do you have $23.50?” he demanded vehemently. “My family just got in a car accident and I need to get to the hospital. Hurry! Please! Give me the money! I need to go now!”

Startled and overwhelmed, my roommate and I began to reach for our purses before I thought better of it. $23.50? What kind of a sum was that? Was this a scam? “I’m sorry, we don’t have any money,” I said, grabbing my roommate’s arm and walking in the opposite direction, suddenly very aware that we were the only people on the dimly lit street. He started to move towards us, insisting that his family was in dire need, but we were speedwalking at this point, holding on tight to each other and to our purses.

When we finally got to the restaurant and sat down, at first we were too shaken to do much more than replay the situation over and over. We oscillated between feeling terrible for having potentially denied money to someone who was in a life-or-death situation, and feeling unsettled and unsafe because we had been accosted by an aggressive stranger. I tried to pinpoint what was at the crux of these negative emotions, and finally managed to detect it: the necessity of mistrust.

It’s the mindset we acquire as we grow up — that in order to protect ourselves, we have to distrust everyone around us, imagine that they have bad intentions and prepare ourselves for the worst. Got to buy anti-virus software so the hackers can’t access our private information. Got to put security systems around our houses, shops and restaurants so thieves don’t break in. Got to take our laptops to the bathroom so they aren’t stolen when we get up from the library table. Got to carry pepper spray in case someone attacks us on the street. When contemporary culture is so fear-saturated, when mistrust lies at the foundation of so many interactions, we give up the most powerful thing we can harness: faith.

The adage “once bitten, twice shy” exists for a reason: If we buy a sandwich for a homeless person but they throw it on the ground, saying they prefer money, it’s very unlikely that we’ll either give food or money to the next homeless person who asks for it. This is a natural reaction, and it is even a smart one. After all, we learn by applying the lessons of past experiences to future scenarios. But in so doing, we cannot lose faith. We cannot allow one bad experience, one person or one interaction to color all of our future interactions with, or our perceptions of others.

I am not quite so naive as to suggest that one should believe every story one hears and hand out money (or walk alone on dark streets or leave laptops unattended) without a second thought. But what I am suggesting is that we need to find that sweet spot between being cynical and being street-smart; between being jaded and between viewing everything through rose-colored glasses. It is foolish to have blind faith in everything, but it is just as foolish to not have faith in anything.

Yet that is exactly what is becoming more and more the modus operandi of our time. Our culture of mistrust has led to a world that is increasingly factionalized, a world where Republicans and Democrats can’t work together because to do so would be to betray one’s own party, a world where people of different races, genders, sexualities and religions are always on the defensive against each other, a world where we cannot walk down the street without wondering if someone might suddenly pull out a hidden gun. So we buy our pepper spray and we denounce the other political party. “We can’t trust them,” we say. “It wouldn’t be prudent.”

And it isn’t always. It was smart of my roommate and me to not open our wallets in front of the man. But it also wouldn’t be smart for us to categorize all people who ask for money as scammers. We need to go out into the classroom, into the city and into the world with not only eyes wide open, but also with our minds wide open.

EMILY HOEVEN is a College sophomore from Fremont, Calif., studying English. Her email address is ehoeven@ sas.upenn.edu. “Growing Pains” appears every other Tuesday.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.