You're right about the general lack of trust overall, and we do need to improve the national dialog which could begin if people of differing political persuasions started being civil to one another. Substituting—or more accurately I should say—reintroducing proper debate in preference to bitter rhetoric would be a good start.

However, this will be a long road and many have entrenched ideas that are going to be hard to change. Thus it seems to me that we need to start with the kids, and first we need to make sure they grow up with solid dependable ethics. Not that I think any of this will be easy as one only has to look at the Ages 18-29 statistics on that graph in the article to realize how little trust young people have in things generally (that graph is a good indicator of how truly bad things are).

Much of this has to with fear, as young people these days grow up to fear and mistrust many things from stranger-danger, the internet and so on. We all know the various reasons for this and it's understandable but it seems to me that we haven't been very successful in simultaneously having them develop sufficient resilience, making them street-wise and so on. (In my opinion having kids grow up and have them be intimidated by the world is a really bad thing but that's what's happening to many of them.)

How we achieve this seems a little beyond my reckoning. All I can say is that when other kids my age and I grew up quite some decades ago the world was a simpler place. We kids had freedoms that are undreamt of by today's kids—freedom to roam about wherever I wanted, and this meant that on occasions I got into some quite difficult predicaments that my parents never knew about. In fact, had my mother known then she'd have been somewhat horrified—but in hindsight that was damn good training for life generally. By the standards of the day, my parents looked after me as well as any other kid, in fact I would consider them overprotective, especially so my mother.

Nevertheless, my independence developed at an early age and was quite robust. For example, by the age of ten I'd become a reasonably seasoned solo traveler. I would often travel from one city to another completely by myself (door-to-door from my parents' home to that of relatives). I walk alone to train station (about 3-4 miles), buy a train ticket then catch an intercity train (still traveling by myself) to large junction station some 70 miles away, change there for a metropolitan local train (many platforms removed from where I'd alighted) that would take me to my relatives' suburb, I'd alight at that stop then walk several miles to my relatives' home and I'd cross several large streets and a major arterial highway in the process. Back then, this was not considered abnormal; as many other kids did the same or similar. (And I need to remind readers that back then there were no mobile phones about, and at the time my relatives did not have the phone connected so my parents did not know if I'd arrived safely or not for some time.)

Today, many would consider that allowing a kid to travel alone like that to be child abuse. Incidentally, at no time did I ever feel intimidated by such travel, in fact I always looked forward to it (especially so, as my parents weren't hovering over me and telling me what to do).