Gene Sparling says that he almost let the amazing gift of the ivory-billed woodpecker slip away because he "was too skeptical and cynical and afraid of being called a fool. I thought it was up to someone else to save the bird, that I wasn't worthy of the task."
Many of us share that skeptical and cynical outlook. In the course of just a few decades, it has become the dominant mindset. For many people, withdrawal from public life has followed.
The bitter divisiveness of American politics is just one example of this pervasive cultural phenomenon.
After all, it's easy to look at the past several decades and extract a dismal tale of official wrongdoing. The Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories that surrounded it. The excesses of the FBI under Hoover. Official lies told to justify the Vietnam War. Watergate and the first U.S. president to resign.
We tell and retell accounts of these events, and many since, with an intense focus on just one story line: powerful people have repeatedly violated the public trust. It's only natural that our sense of betrayal would grow and extend to other leaders and institutions, including those in the social sector.
Cynicism is an understandable response to that reality. Indeed, in such a context the cynic's expression of a truth can even seem like a breath of fresh air.
There's something else at work here. I'd also suggest that cynicism is a cover for people whose idealism has been buried under disappointment and frustration. When we feel our high hopes for society have been dashed, it may be healthy self-protection to tone down our dreams, to become reserved and skeptical.
But the cost is great when mistrust becomes the prevailing way of life, when society as a whole experiences a generalized loss of belief in people and in institutions of all kinds. It's one thing to hold a healthy skepticism and to question authority. It's quite another to allow cynicism to become so dominant a way of meeting the world that it limits what we believe is possible for humanity.
This kind of atmosphere puts a damper on creativity, imagination, and achievement. Little breathing room is left for passions, hopes, and dreams, which get picked apart, dismissed, even ridiculed. Yet, as we've seen, those very ingredients are the foundation of a vibrant civilization.
Different stories can be told if we turn our attention to what the past tells us about what we're made of, who we are as a people. We may be surprised to find that the very events often cited as evidence of social decline can instead be seen as our proudest moments, recounted as times when our democratic institutions prevailed, a free press exposed official lies, and ordinary people's voices were heard.
What options would open to us if we chose to tell those stories? How might that choice sustain the vitality of public life?
As I've said before, we could spend a lot of time exploring which accounts of our past are most "true" or "real." I have a different question in mind: Of all the stories we could choose to relate, which are most useful in creating the world we want?