We were power-walking along the Las Vegas Strip a few years ago when a woman pushing an empty wheelchair zipped by us in a rapid jog. I turned to my wife and remarked, “Maybe she’s a caregiver late to transport some handicapped person.”
Then we veered off the boulevard in another direction for a bit before returning to the main sidewalk of the Strip. Shortly, we again encountered the woman who had passed us, but she was not pushing some person in need of assistance.
Instead, she was sitting in the wheelchair where Las Vegas beggars sit on a pedestrian bridge with handmade cardboard signs revealing their desperate plights to passing tourists. Over her lap she had draped a blanket in the sweltering heat. And, though she had a full head of hair when she passed us on her way to her station, she now wore a headscarf in the manner of some women subjected to hair loss through chemotherapy or radiation treatments for their cancers. In short, she was running a scam to empty the pockets of passersby. Trust: “It don’t come easy.”
Las Vegas has no shortage of scam artists that will use any secular or religious symbol or mechanism for profit, but encountering such an artist in such a place leads one to doubt in other places. “How am I supposed to look upon the next wheelchair-bound beggar?” We carry trust and distrust from place to place.
Of course, in our adult lives we learn nuances that help us to distinguish between honest and dishonest, trustworthy and untrustworthy, but the subtleties of deception always lurk behind a headscarf hiding a full head of hair.
Animals. Yes animals. Some are untrustworthy. Cowbirds fool other birds into raising their young. Many parasitic animals fool members of other species. And there are some that fool members of their own species, such as the tufted capuchin monkeys of Iguazú National Park in Argentina. To trick dominant members of the species away from a cache of bananas, the younger capuchins give off fictional warnings that a predator is nearby (http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141125-four-animals-that-lie-using-sound ).
Members of our species trick not only other species, but also other humans, and they do it on a scale that can have international implications. Thus, treaties are made and broken. Think Hitler and Stalin in World War II. Think Tamerlane and Husayn in the fourteenth century. Think centuries of broken treaties.
Trust, as Ringo sings, “don’t come easy.” What would history look like if it were to come easily? What would relationships look like? Are you trustworthy?