A scorpion needs to get across a river, so he asks a frog to give him a ride.

“That’s crazy,” says the frog. “We’ll get halfway across, you’ll sting me and I’ll drown.”

“Why would I do that?” argues the scorpion. “I’d drown, too.”

It makes perfect sense, so the frog agrees. The scorpion climbs on the frog’s back and they start across the river. Halfway to the other side, the scorpion stings the frog.

“Why did you do it?” the frog asks as they’re going under. “Now you’ll drown, as well.”

“Because I’m a scorpion,” comes the answer, “and that’s my character.”

Wake up, kids. It’s not a bedtime story, I’m going somewhere with this.

In the spring of 2006, Louis Rubino stood up in a courthouse and told those in attendance he was not a monster. He had cooked a little methamphetamine, the 24-year-old admitted, and was prepared to face the consequences.

“I’m not as bad as everyone thinks I am,” Rubino told the court.

Few were buying it. In these halls of good and bad, black and white, a meth-cooking drug addict was regarded as one of them: a dark character who resides in the sinister underground and threatens the safety and happiness of those of us who live righteously.

Rubino was sent away to prison for four years. Across the courtroom, prosecutor James Cameron consulted with others on the side of right. Hands were shaken, congratulations passed. Good had triumphed once more.

We don’t deck our public servants in powdered wigs these days, but that’s how a community sees them: right-thinking authorities who protect us from bad guys and lock up those who would break the laws of civilized men.

Two years after Louis Rubino was locked away, the man who prepared the case against him is being investigated himself. James Cameron, who stood tall for years on the side of law and order, is accused of keeping lurid photos of children on his office computer. If the allegations are to be believed, this kiddie porn occupied the same hard drive space that beheld the rock solid case against the big, bad meth cooker.

I don’t mean to single out Cameron or Rubino specifically. It’s only that this example of blurred lines is too flagrant to dismiss.

I’ve been pondering lately the troublesome nature of trust.

I’ve been on the crime beat here for 14 years. And what those two dog-years have left me with is this cynical idea that nobody, but nobody, can be trusted. Not grandmotherly women who give you butterscotch candy, not cops, not the nice lady at the library. As the great Andre Linoge said: “Your town is full of pedophiles, thieves, gluttons, murderers, bullies, scoundrels and covetous morons. And I know every last one of them.”

In childhood, we believe that grownups are saviors, until we learn differently. As young adults, we still believe that most people are essentially good. Maybe some of you still retain that idea, but for me, faith in innate goodness bought the farm around my second year of reporting.

School teachers and coaches molest. Police officers go bad like outdated milk. Kindly old men with great stories about the old days are secret deviants and have been that way all their lives. The nice lady who lives next door is a crack addict who occasionally prostitutes her children for the next piece of the rock. The businessman who sponsors a little league team has bodies buried in the basement. Children steal medication from parents and sell it. City leaders embezzle your tax dollars. Reporters make up stories and sell them as truth. Sports heroes kill their wives.

It’s ugly, all of it. Against my wishes, I have developed the stance where I assume that people are bad until they convince me otherwise. In my world is a small handful of people I know to be earnest and good. The rest I treat like they’re earnest and good, but I don’t turn my back on them entirely.

It’s a paranoid and jaded way to live, but what can you do? Gone are the days where you could get by on faith. Absolute trust in any government, group or individual these days is foolhardy. You might as well send your bank information to that prince who wrote you from Nigeria. He’s probably on the up-and-up about his plans to share his fortune with you.

Me, I’d rather hang out in the gangsta bar on the bad side of town, where everyone has a chain in a back pocket and a blade in their shoe. In that kind of place, what you see is what you get. It’s a room full of crooks who will knock you down or slice you up when things go bad, but you know that going in.

More devilish and deceptive is the real world, where scorpions are everywhere and sometimes they pose as frogs. You never know who has a stinger out for you and so any trust at all is a liability. It’s a pessimistic way of thinking and a long way around to make a point. But as the saying goes, I don’t trust anybody these days but me and thee.

And sometimes I wonder about thee.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal crime beat reporter.