Barbara Presnell: Rebuilding trust, one neighbor at a time
Barbara Presnell
My friend, who, in her 60’s, moved into a retirement home with her wife to live out the rest of their days, has found community. It’s an older crowd, and she’s among the young ones, so she finds herself caretaking, not because she’s asked to but because she sees her neighbors and fellow lunch friends in need.
Everybody at the place gets along. “We aren’t allowed to display political signs or advertise political events,” she told me. “We can have political gatherings in the privacy of our own homes. It works.” The board—composed of residents as well as management—realizes that political discussion is a butcher knife slicing through a group of otherwise amicable people.
So, instead, she and a neighbor, whose political views are on the total other end of the divide, share a love of gospel music. Politics doesn’t enter their conversation. They sing together.
Community.
I felt it last year when I attended an event at The Fox and Olive sponsored by a local news organization. It was a space so crowded with “others” that our differing skins brushed as we moved around the room, and hugs were a happy result. Speeches about unity, inclusion, hope, and change brought tears to a lot of eyes, all of us so tired of division and distrust, hungry for ways we could work together, be together as community.
I realized then and I realize again now that I don’t trust much anymore. Of fifty emails, one might be from a real person with a real comment. Text messages are scams. I don’t answer the door when the doorbell rings unless I’ve been texted first. Reliable news is almost nonexistent, replaced by social media reels and AI-generated fictions. The person we elected as president is one offensive lie after another.
In January, on that cold, rainy Sunday when I stood with the rest of Lexington on Main Street waiting for the monks, I heard a stranger say that the posted live map was intentionally not correct, that the monks’ organizers didn’t want people to know where they were. What? When you can’t trust the monks, those courageous, faithful men with the toughest feet and softest voices, then who can you trust?
Seems I’m not alone. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, 73% of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing. In 2025, the number has dropped to 17% of Americans.
Back then, trust extended to neighbors, teachers, friends, and family. It included hope in a future, the belief that our children would be better off than we were, that the American dream was still attainable. That thinking crossed cultures, classes, and neighborhoods. Today, we step out the door with skepticism on our faces.
There’s safety in distrust, of course. The stranger is out to do us harm, the “other” is trying to change our way of life. Everybody wants our money.
A week after the January ice storm, my dog and I were walking the neighborhood when we came upon a large patch of ice in the road. Before I knew it, I was stuck. Couldn’t go forward or I’d fall. Couldn’t go back or I’d fall. I clung to the branches of a bare fig bush, attempting to inch ahead. Sky was growing darker, and I was getting colder. I did not know what to do.
When a neighbor came along. Older than I am. Not who I would have called if I’d called for help, but there he was. “Give me the dog,” he said, easing onto the icy patch, “and then take my hand.”
“He’ll pull you down,” I said. “You don’t need to fall.” But my neighbor reached out—first, the leash, then my hand. I slid, literally, across the ice, but I didn’t fall. The neighbor cleared a bare patch for a foothold, and I made it. The dog made it. Then we all went on our way.
Just days ago, two other things happened: I watched Brandi Carlile, with the most sincere and authentic and beautiful voice in America today, pour her heart into my heart as she sang, “America, the Beautiful” to open Super Bowl LX. A queer woman of courage, grace, and hope, a woman who has faced some of this country’s greatest challenges, she sang for me. She sang for all of us.
Then came the controversial Bad Bunny halftime show, and my heart grew ten sizes larger as I listened to words in a language I could only catch a meaning of now and then, as he named American countries one by one, declaring, “We are America!”, as he knelt down to give his recently won Grammy to a boy who looked like Liam Ramos, as across the stadium we read the words, “The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate Is Love.”
My trust meter spiked. My hope mug spilled over.
We are a nation divided not only by politics but by falsehood. Lies. Everything can be reworked to make it look real. Human history can be removed from walls and textbooks and attempts to scrape what we know to be true from our brains has done considerable damage across the country. But I have to believe that a decreasing number of brains are allowing themselves to be scraped, and truth is right in front of us, if we allow ourselves to look with our own eyes.
The thing that our leadership doesn’t understand is that when you attempt to take something away—books from schools and libraries, history as it continues to open our eyes, decency, half-time shows that unite, even citizen-made cell-phone videos that show images that are crystal clear—people only want that thing more.
We want truth. We want to trust. I think we can trust again, maybe one person at a time.
I circle back to community. Neighbors. A hand reached out to take mine. There is someone—some ones—who are slicing this country in two with sharp, irresponsible knives. We can’t let them.
I still trust the monks and those remarkable feet.
I love gospel music.
When a hand reaches for mine, I hope I take it. I hope my own hand reaches for another.
