Trust in Government is Way Down. Is That Why Many Are Growing Their Own Food?
It was 1958 when the Pew Research Center began asking Americans how they felt about their government. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and the economy about booming, empowering and encouraging a new middle class.
Then, about three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time. Now — and this has been the case since 2007 — the number is consistently below 30%. Today, even among Democrats who often applaud government programs, only 25% trust the Washington bureaucracy. Among Republicans, who once favored limited spending and now seem to be morphing into a uniparty that supports forever wars, the number is 8%.
This decline in trust also applies I think to other institutions — the Disney Corporation, the medical profession, the two-tiered justice system. And the effects are global, part of a war between autocratic dicta and the right of free speech, the right to differ from those whose ethics are often compromised by corruption.
During the COVID pandemic, government officials denied that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan and assured us the vaccine would be safe and effective. They closed parks and insisted children stay home from school. They kept churches locked but liquor stores open. A friend of mine, neither a Biden nor a Trump fan, told me recently — in a still-shocked voice — “The government lied to us!”
Most who took boosters know from their own experience that the vaccine did not stop transmission. See RealNotRare.com for testimonials about vaccine injuries, a large number posted by young people whose lives were upended by catastrophic illness.
Some agencies are walking back their pandemic-era predictions of safety. The National Academies, in a study funded by the HHS, found a direct link between the mRNA vaccines and myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. The CDC is now acknowledging facial paralysis was a COVID vaccine side effect. The FDA was forced in a court case to delete articles on its website that disparaged the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID. And Sen. Bernie Sanders just introduced a “Long COVID Moonshot” bill to research those still suffering. There’s a campaign afoot to convince him to include the vaccine injured in this new billions-dollar health effort.
All of this has corroded trust, magnified by a biased Social Media landscape where conspiracy is frequently on the menu and censorship plain as day. Still, every so often there is a populist backlash, an outpouring of citizen unrest.
In Japan last week, tens of thousands came out to protest against the World Health Organization’s plans to impose a pandemic treaty on the planet that would see nations give up their sovereignty in favor of Geneva’s instructions. Already, WHO allies, including the media, are pushing a new bird flu pandemic. Mary Holland, president of the Children’s Health Defense, founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said she was “thrilled to see the outpouring of resistance” to the attempted WHO global health takeover. “Japan has historically been ahead of the curve in resisting vaccine coercion,” she said. “And the Japanese people have experienced terrifying technological warfare, including nuclear weapons and biological ones.”
When we feel we can no longer depend on government to keep us safe, when we doubt the intentions of major corporations or disparage the Deep Swamp or the Federal Reserve — all roads lead back home. Maybe that’s why gun sales in states with high crime rates are soaring. And maybe that’s why self-sufficiency is making a comeback.
I noticed recently there is a booming movement to grow your own food. Streamlined shows like Max’s Homegrown, where Jamila Norman helps Atlanta area families turn their backyards into farms, blogs on longevity that suggest gardening can extend your life, online gardening workshops, elevated wooden planters and hydroponic growing system sales — all these cultural markers suggest a new trend. Recently, the USDA approved lab-grown meat, part of the sustainable food movement. Perhaps gardening is booming because Americans no longer trust the USDA to keep their food safe.
Gut health is trending, and some are promoting an overhaul to cut sugar and processed foods from our diet. Surely this is a thumbs-down on our food industry, which keeps putting sugar in our soft drinks, salad dressings and cereals because, well, it’s additive. And also a rejection of our medical profession, which treats all abnormalities with medicines, adding new ones to address the side effects caused by the first ones. Wellness is not absence of disease. It is optimal health.
Amid this awakening, some people are even growing medicinal herbs and plants to make their own medicines — think raw honey for homemade cough syrup — and surely this is a referendum on Big Pharma, which keeps promoting poisons when nature offers alternatives. Read Sayer Ji’s Regenerate on harvesting your own cures.
In this time of turmoil, when some are predicting a biblical end of times and others a political revolution, maybe personal responsibility is the silver lining.
Our foundational truths are under attack, the nation deeply divided on issues like who to censor and who to let speak, on who to prosecute and who to let walk free.
Time to take care of ourselves. On the eve of Earth Day, let us grow more lettuce.