Scout's honor: Who do you trust?

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: Brief Article

Your pharmacist? What about the millionaire pharmacist in Missouri who was bilking customers by charging them for cancer medication and giving them fake drugs? He pleaded guilty to 20 counts of fraud, and said he did it so he could make the final payment on a $1 million pledge to his church. This guy strikes me as someone who would definitely rob Peter to pay Paul.

And speaking of saints, how about the Catholic priest crisis in New England? I remember when it was an honor to be an altar boy.

How about the guy in Georgia who was offering cremation services but got a little behind in his work? Talk about being stiffed. Imagine. And I thought the Enron investigators were having trouble finding where all the bodies were buried.

What's happened here? It used to be that you could trust just about everyone. Heck, 40 years ago the worst the bad people would do, most of the time, was inconvenience you.

Now children kill children.

It wasn't that long ago that the most respected, and largest, business in town -- any town -- was the First National Bank & Trust. Now they call the bank something like Alleviate, a name designed to confuse you out of your money

We have been heading in this direction for some time now. Historically, we had trust, followed by Nixon. Soon thereafter, with Jimmy Carter, we had a "crisis of confidence" -- or just poor leadership.

Then, sometime in the Reagan years, we had "Trust, but verify"

In the years of the elder Bush administration, we had "Read my lips We did, and paid more taxes anyway In the Clinton years, it was every man for himself-- "I did not have. . . . "

Now we have governmental leadership that started under a very dark cloud of uncertainty, and we can't even get...