I couldn't agree with more with, well, everything Mr. Kristoff wrote.
65
Oddly it's a strange sort of collectivist mentality- the mentality of the oarsman in a Roman warship- if you can't row for the rest of us, walk the plank- if I'm going to do the work, in the galley of capitalism, then if you're a freeloader you don't deserve to live or have a life- it's a messed up ideology of sick people who have a false sense of excellence, and when they fail, which they will, I hope go to an unmarked grave in a ditch. It usually takes some external shock to jar such people to their senses and their humanity-
26
I love my trust fund friends, they so simply excuse these people as week. Walk a mile in their shoes.
22
"Ajax in Georgia was even harsher: “Natural selection weeding out those less fit for survival.”"
Harsher? Rather childish, but to be expected, interpretation of reality. Kind of like "it's not fair". This is exactly what natural selection is. Those who fail have a much smaller chance of propagating their bloodline. Why? Because they failed.
No where do we see any of these Socialist behaviors in other species. Why? Because those that don't concentrate on survival, beginning with themselves and then those immediately around them, fail to survive. So they don't propagate.
Mankind will eventually reach a tipping point, where it's collective behavior will result in events that they can't control. Why? Because mankind wastes it's time flailing their arms and gnashing their teeth around "harsh" and "cruel" when the unsustainable can no longer be sustained. They are wasting precious resources on the survival of the unfit. Those who contribute little to nothing to the propagation of the species.
Like it or not that's the real science behind all this.
8
Well said. Turning a blind eye or pointing the blame at those suffering does nothing to move us forward as a nation.
23
At the beginning of each school year, I used to include in our discussion about the social setting that would work best for success this consideration: we’re here to help each other succeed. We took breaks during the year to do a social checkup and one of the words that came out of these discussions was “community”. Linked to the motto on the dollar bill, “E Pluribus Unum”, the word community spotlighted the problem in dysfunctional groups when there’s not enough “Pluribus” and too much “Unum”. Has this imbalance been largely the problem in American society over the last 50 years or so?
11
The older I get, the less I believe in the concept of “personal choice” as determinative of life outcome. We are each constrained by so many factors: available options, personal history, and genetics, to name just a few. Those who are the most vociferous proponents of personal responsibility seem to enjoy attributing their own happy and successful life to their moral and intellectual superiority. They are judgmental in the most uncharitable and arrogant of ways. Better to think first, as I was taught as a child, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
81
It is important we as a nation offer reasonable help to needy citizens.It is true that circumstances can cause any of us to behave differently. How ever, choosing to deal with these problems with alcohol and drugs or violence is still an individual choice. WE have to be ready to accept the consequences of our choices.
Locking people up is not and answer and helping them recover is important but we must always remind ourselves that there are millions in the same circumstances who did not choose drugs and alcohol.
17
Judge not that you may not be judged for with what judgement you judge you shall be judged.
When Artificial Intelligence takes away more and more jobs people without mercy will start to experience real hardship. They will expect the welfare of Universal Basic Income and perhaps develop compassion for the less fortunate.
7
@Kathleen
They will need JOBS and the continuation of the American Dream they will get "Universal Basic Income".
3
In what lexicon of morality does making bad choices and exhibiting character flaws mean you are unworthy of help?
32
We've spent the last four years looking in a mirror at ourselves, and my God, the image is ugly ! Maybe this is the result of unbridled capitalism and consumerism. I'm not really sure this county deserves to exist...
25
A couple of thoughts:
All this is wired into your laws. It’s all about the individual’s rights, nothing about any obligations. Except for the bit about the well regulated militia, but I digress.
The flip side of self reliance becomes the heck with you.
17
My grandmother was an illiterate immigrant, but boy, was she smart.
"It's better to be smart than pretty, and it's more important to be good than smart."
If we are not good to each other we are not human.
21
This column is so important -- its analysis so crucial to understanding the unraveling we have witnessed in this country for decades since the Reagan "(counter)revolution" kicked off the GOP's systematic demolition of FDR's New Deal -- a demolition continuing (and under Trump, accelerating) today.
I'm a boomer born in 1946. There was nothing in the arc of my life rising above my working class origins into the middle class which was not directly related to opportunities created by liberal social policies: the end of discrimination against Jews in Ivy League college admissions brought about by civil rights legislation, liberal loan policies to finance my college education once I was admitted, a booming economy once I graduated under girded by Keynsian economic policies -- and so on and so forth. Granted, nothing was handed to me; I worked by butt off. But I worked my butt off because there was never a moment when it didn't seem -- as it so commonly seems today -- that my hard work would not pay off. Never a moment of the terminal despair so pervasive among those left behind today.
And this could change. It could change quickly and radically. All we need is some progressive, compassionate -- and smart -- leadership. And a return to social policies that uplift, support, and encourage. Policies which work for everybody.
53
“When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.” — Mark Twain
17
Beautifully said.
9
In my mind I think clearly these issues are America’s fault. As citizens we have allowed our political class unfettered control and have lost our sense of owning the system. We get played every day. Big money and access have created a prostituted group of people - politicians, lobbyists, lawyers to this class, that do what is best for them, big business and special interest groups - while missing the part about the 95 percent of the country with limited access. The average American is played by the system over and over and we have not figured out how the heck to kick these creeps out and get just good people in.
22
Such smug callousness in a Christian nation? "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." No one is truly safe until we are ALL safe.
34
What we know about institutional racism - see even your own newspaper - should raise awareness about comparing the plight of these white children born in a white society to those of an African American baby born in Philadelphia. Sorry - this family may have encountered their own private and public demons, but drawing even an implicit comparison, as you do here, is disingenuous.
6
"Ajax in Georgia was even harsher: 'Natural selection weeding out those less fit for survival.'”
Yes, that statement needs cultural evolution context, but it's true by definition.
The margins of selection are tight, impersonal & brutally enforced.
Natural selection will soon be "weeding out" world civilization because we don't fit the unprecedented, emergent environs we continue to generate.
The Knapps, & millions of others, are early casualties of the oncoming apocalypse — like the causalities of 2.9 billion less birds since 1970; like the bees, insects, elephants, tigers, fish, forests, groundwater, micro-plastic rain...
Let's not omit the new, soon-to-be omnipotent terrorists — the Sky & Ocean being armed with weapons of mass extinction.
Verily, like the Knapps, the prognosis for our offspring is: "premature and perverted death."
I've blamed for decades. & yes, there are people that accelerate our demise. But, like us, they have biology, i.e., they operate on the fundamental, selected code for relationship interface that's been conserved across species: Fitness Beats Truth, (Donald Hoffman).
That code doesn't work given our species' unprecedented reach — add > 6 billion people since 1900, & simultaneously, give billions exponentially more powerful technology—tech generated by yet another emergent phenomenon: exponentially accruing knowledge.
Humans aren't coded — biologically or culturally — to process complex global relationship information with exponential dynamics.
6
Jonathan from St.Louis and Ajax from Georgia are why we’re here in the first place. It’s that kind of cynicism that allows society to disintegrate to the point that it has. A compete lack of empathy and a simplistic view of complex issues.
34
"central Philadelphia"
That's Center City, to you New Yorkers.
7
If you actually spend time around far left people, you will know that they are actually very social Darwinist in outlook. The difference is that they make exceptions for certain kinds of people. But a white male in poverty (and to a lesser extent, a white female) is absolutely viewed as a loser, having been unable to take advantage of blanket white privilege, deemed worthy of every misery that befalls him.
17
Is it too much to expect that those people "in a ZIP code of North Philadelphia with a largely poor and black population" can "acknowledge personal responsibility but also our collective social responsibility — especially to help children?" Or does that responsibility only fall on the largely white and more affluent community.
5
I started to write: required reading for everyone in the federal and state government. And then I thought, faith leaders too (esp the sanctimonious religious right). But wait...it's required reading for all of us. It's the best explanation I've read of why we are where are. Thank you.
7
You are just plain wrong Mr. Kristoff. The all encompassing poverty of spirit in the people you want to help is far, far beyond saving. The best thing you could do is remove the children of these awful people from the home.
Sure, national health care, cutting the military budget, and investment in education would help, but what possible chance do these kids have living with these losers?
When I hear people like you spout these naive solutions, I think, "Why don't you teach them to play the cello while you're at it."
9
We are dying from racism, hate and jealousy. We don’t want anyone to get anything we don’t have like healthcare that we vote against our own interests over and over and over again. We don’t want immigrants but we don’t want to do the low paying dirty jobs. We don’t want abortion but we also don’t want to pay for quality daycare. We have exactly the government we deserve and we are dying for our choices.
28
I am so sorry anyone has to hear these callous responses from people who most likely know little to nothing about chronic despair.
27
Suicide rates for blacks are much lower than for whites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
Even the rate for Native Americans is lower than that for whites. Suicide rates in many more egalitarian countries such as Finland and Japan are higher than in the US. Causes of suicide are obviously complex. In the US a major specific factor is the criminal selling of opioids based on the false claim that they are not addictive. The increasing rate of suicide among whites is a problem, but increasing inequality and lack of economic opportunities for all races are bigger problems which should not be tied to one thing such as suicide.
5
@skeptonomist Sadly too many people believe the lies of supremacy. But we all want the same things: love and a purpose-driven life.
7
There were a lot of spectacularly cruel and ugly comments on the story about the changes to school lunch programs by the “president”. What is wrong with people?
13
It is true that ultimately everything is your own choice. For instance, you can choose to make an asinine and insensitive statement like, "Poverty is a character flaw."
17
You are right we don’t invest in our children and/but the family you picked the Knapps didn’t support your argument the Knapps seem to have invested a lot into their children. It’s tough growing when you know all the answers and it’s tough on life when boredom sets in and you don’t like the choices presented to you. A clockwork orange moment in time
3
The global folic acid famine unnecessarily kills or disables about as many children as polio did before erradication campaign. It kills each year 20 times as many as the birth defects causing drug thalidomide did in Europe—considered one of the greatest tragedies for child and families. We fortified food with the b vitamin folic acid to great success in 1998. Spina bifida F—the global biggest cause of spina bifida bifida is now 80% less in Atlanta than it was when I joined the Cdc birthdefects prevention team in 1968. In many countries whose governments do not require adding this vitamin to food as the FDA requires the rate is 20 TIMES as current rate in North America. Governments need to take this action and CDC needs a 25 million dollar increased appropriation a year for ten years to build the sustainable program of folic acid fortification that will make this disease as rare as polio is today. We have the “vaccine” to make this disease go away but globally only 20% of children have benefitted from this life saving vitamin. All governments must require adding this simple b vitamin to food in sufficient amount. CDC has the knowledge to lead this effort and should be funded to help the children of the world to live and immediately reduce child mortify and help countries achieve their 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. godfrey Oakley former Director Division of Birth Defects at CDC. Now Emory Center for Spina Bifida Prevention Director.
6
We Americans have socially and politically bought the idea of 'deserving vs. Undeserving poor' not realizing that we are all deserving of human dignity. What a terrible place we have come to.
13
Spot on throughout.
Accept it: adolescents make stupid choices often, and especially they do so when their options seem limited. It's our job to get them through to the time when they ain't so dern young and stupid.
Maybe it's simple grace.
But why can't people find it in their hearts to offer grace? I think it is because they haven't felt it given to them. Society's job is to rise to the point where more and more people feel graced, and gracious.
16
My favorite is ...whenever there is a conversation about how tough it can be to overcome one's upbringing, generational poverty etc., a common response from certain people is to then showcase a single person known to them...or a famous person...who overcame their upbringing and is now super-successful.
But what people fail to consider is that such stories are the Exception, not the Rule. Does anyone grow up wanting to fail...wanting to be poor, etc.? People have no idea what it's like when you didn't have an ideal upbringing, or you grew up in extreme poverty.
How often do we see people who grew up the sons and daughters of successful, well-to-do parents, who go on to...start their own companies...marry into other well-to-do families etc? And conversely, how often do we see people who grew up with dysfunction, grew up around drugs and alcohol, or with parents who didn't finish high school, and who simply repeat the cycle?
This is no accident people. We must do better to help people less fortunate than ourselves.
It's a disgrace...the money this country has for War...to help out corporations...but yet, no money for decent affordable healthcare for all, safe/modern/effective infrastructure, affordable higher education, better public schools, etc.
19
I thought you & your wife's original article was fantastic-- a poignant narrative to demonstrate the influence of a weakened and in-need system. And I appreciate this response.
The explanation or excuse of 'personal responsibility' is easy because it's most apparent. This narrative is representative of American values-- at core: the individual. Individual responsibility, individual gain, individual freedoms. Unfortunately, whether we choose to see it or not, systemic issues require systemic solutions... while they might be altered by changing a single node, or solving a single symptom, the roots prevail, symptoms will reoccur. The narratives of the 'nodes', like the one you've profiled (at whatever scale we choose, whether an individual, a family, a school, a town, etc.) I think are most demonstrative of infected or problematic roots. Studying these points, these stories, to where and how we may solve-- to build scaffolding to support the desired evolution or shift.
This issue, in particular, is a huge passion of mine, and my work: to design for intangible outcomes. I so look forward to reading Tightrope.
4
I agree. To further their own ends, the Social Darwinists (i.e.Capitalists) promulgate the "personal responsibility" creed. But, the idea of "society" is that we cooperate for our mutual benefit. Our society is losing that key understanding, and caring that goes with it.
9
It is both theirs and our fault. And the guilt crosses all political and economic lines. The fault falls hard on the media which glories LSD and other psychotic drugs. The push to legalize marijuana shifts the pain, from those who use this drug to those who will be harmed by their use. Their children and strangers killed and maimed in accidents the friends and relatives who are stolen from and abused.
2
The function of the personal responsibility narrative is to isolate the better privileged from the discomfort of sorrow, guilt and shame. If your suffering is all just your shameful fault, I don’t have to feel bad for you; indeed, I get to feel disdainful of you, and even angry at you. It’s a biblical story: I ain’t my brother’s keeper.
10
I don't disagree sir. But half the population evidently does so its likely the cruelty and uncaring for the less fortunate will continue. I see this every day on the internet.
6
Thank you for this follow up. I was so distressed by the many harsh comments to your original article. I graduated from high school in south Arkansas in 1974 and lived in a small but vibrant and lovely town with well-kept houses and yards. I was back there recently and the small towns in the area are all dead. The only people who remain in the now neglected houses and barren yards live on social security. If they are old enough and lucky. The family farms and light industry that sustained the economy in my youth are long gone. And nothing replaced them. There is no economy. Were all those thousands of people who worked hard, raised their families, went to church, painted their houses and mowed their lawns, cheered on their local sports teams, and paid their taxes....lazy, stupid, and irresponsible? Hardly. But anyone who says they were is intellectually lazy and socially and morally irresponsible. What they were was terribly served by government policies (like, ironically, Arkansas-raised Bill Clinton’s NAFTA) that created an economy that served only business interests and consumers at the expense of the working classes. They voted for Donald Trump but they aren’t responsible for his election. That distinction belongs to successive Administrations and Congresses that destroyed the rural working class’s way of life.
17
If you actually think this is true, I don't know how to help you. If you know better and you wrote it anyway, shame on you.
"Even in this presidential campaign, the unraveling of working-class communities receives little attention. There is talk about the middle class, but very little about the working class; we discuss college access but not the one in seven children who don’t graduate from high school. America is like a boat that is half-capsized, but those partying above water seem oblivious."
7
I wonder why it is that Japanese tend not to litter in public places, or why Japanese CEOs tend to make less than their Western counterparts. Maybe it is in part due to the custom of bowing upon greeting someone. The more an individual is respected, the deeper the bow. Perhaps it serves as a reminder of one's position in society, and more importantly, a reminder of his/her obligation to be a good citizen and serve the common good.
(I wonder if Carlos Ghosn started to get some shallow bows.. maybe that would have been a bad omen.)
4
Spot in, Mr. Kristof! Thank you for laying bare our national disgrace. We must now act to help our American family members and vanquish those who act to let our family members drown in poverty, ignorance, and neglect.
5
Excellent points. It is so appalling that the Republican party, the traditional party of "personal responsibility" that is behind the refusal of some states to insure their citizens under Medicaid, that party is freestyling its way into the history books as the most lawless, gutless, sad-sack political party in American history. We need to make sure they understand the consequences of their choices.
5
I've always figured that trashing the downtrodden is a way in which people reassure themselves that it'll never happen to them. If the victims are at fault it means you can't become a victim yourself without being at fault and you may hold the belief that you won't slip up. Ironically not slipping up is relative and full spectrum. So in your mind you can "not slip up" by only injecting drugs you've already seen someone inject.
9
There but for the grace of God go I.
14
I am an American who has lived in Canada for over 30 years. I look back at what the US has become with horror. It's a violent, cruel society full of greedy people who attend church every Sunday but don't care about anyone outside their immediate family and friends. They don't want to pay taxes; the government will just waste the money. Poor people are lazy bums who deserve their miserable lot in life. Healthcare is too expensive to provide to everyone, and the lazy bums don't deserve good healthcare anyway. Affluent/wealthy people are superior to everyone else. Why else would they be rich?
It's disgusting how people think. The ugly ideas they spew without any understanding of how they are manipulated into believing things that damage people in their community and ultimately themselves. How far America has fallen and I don't see the bottom yet.
32
Thank you for you story of the Knapps. I just saw the play "Sweat." Everyone should. And then the US should start helping those who suffer from economic change.
3
We believe St. David Byrne sed it best.. "" They say compassion is a virtue... but I don't have the time " One can only hope he was being ironic.
Please run for the presidency. You have my vote.
3
I was hoping to comment on Nicholas’ earlier piece, but it was closed. Thank you for waking up. Around 10 years ago I wrote a comment (either posting or letter) asking why you spent so much time with interns traveling the globe looking for injustice when it existed in spades in your own back yard? Finally.
Something I see as ironic is the country’s final recognition of the opioid crisis. Having worked at a metropolitan hospital in Detroit during the late ‘70s & early ‘80s I recall the judgmental comments directed at the predominantly black drug abusers. Funny thing, when opportunity decreases in the WASP communities on Cape Cod, something similar happens.
C. Wright Mills wrote “The Power Elite” in the 1950s as an exploration of a method of human governance in a complex civilization. This elite is right before our eyes and the cynicism & discontent we experience today is the direct result of their failure of governance.
Perhaps you will spend more time now recognizing and describing the damage done to this civilization over the past 30+ years. But for the opportunity afforded you, absent would be the Harvard education & the Rhodes scholarship. Perhaps you would have followed more the paths of your peers on bus #6.
7
You can say all that until you are blue in the face and it will make no difference. Why? Go talk to the fellow your colleague interviewed recently whose teeth were falling out who said he'd rather fix himself up with duct tape than have his taxes go to socialized medicine.
7
Does this same “grace” apply to the many pain patients suffering or committing suicide because they can no longer get the opioid pain medications they had used responsibly for years — medications that allowed them to stay employed, play with their kids, run errands and more, but that the author has unfortunately chosen to describe only as “addictive”?
Opioid pain meds are critical to many suffering patients with intractable pain due to genetic conditions, automobile accidents, fibromyalgia, MS, Ehlers Danos Syndrome, arachnoiditis, failed surgeries and more.
Stop demonizing our meds!! People with the disease of addiction need treatment. But the VAST MAJORITY of people in pain management NEVER go on to misuse their meds. They never become “addicted.”
Also, New York Times - why not cover THIS crisis?! We have a chronic pain crisis in our country now. We have a crisis impacting those stigmatized populations w/ disabilities, on Medicaid and Medicare, vets w/ with chronic pain, etc. You want to talk about despair?! Follow some of the pain patient groups online - these people are very much in despair because their meds have been ripped away from them due to others’ issues and to outrageous opiophobia — put explicitly, due to media and government fear mongering and deceit.
Want to know more? Check out Chronic Illness Advocacy & Awareness Group’s groundbreaking report “Violation of a Nation,” on how the federal government, Kaiser and others purposefully took these meds away.
12
Fine sentiments, vague solutions.
6
Thank you! You have presented this in a way that blasts those “personal responsibilities” arguments to pieces. If I was faced with a life of diminished opportunities, I might try to get out of my head with drugs and alcohol. Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. At least that’s what Jesus, Buddha and Allah would do.
4
Nicholas,
I sympathize with your friends and find myself praying for the Knapps.
Please consider two suggestions.
First, please heed Cornel West who chides liberals for reducing spiritual crisis to economic analysis.
Second, dive into the deep end. Stop standing at the edge of the pool asking sophomoric questions about whether Mary was a virgin or not and memorize her Magnificat: "He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty." Luke 1
3
I know hundreds of such people from my childhood in Rust Belt Western Pennsylvania. Mean-spirited, racist, and homophobic, they often talk of “personal responsibility.” Some received public assistance, but claim it’s different for them than it is for “The Blacks.” They hate the imaginary “immigrants taking their jobs” — jobs that left 30-40 years ago due to automation of the town steel factory. Others are like my aunts and uncles, middle class, college-educated, and have great jobs.
I’m only 20 years out from my high school reunion, and I know at least a dozen folks with whom I graduated who are dead from various drug, alcohol, drunk driving, gun accident, and suicidal causes. They were all white boys, mediocre jocks, with better houses than I grew up in, and most of their parents went to college.
It’s sad that they died, even though it was, in my opinion, a result of their bad decisions. But here’s where you get it wrong. They don’t want my sympathy, and they don’t want yours, Mr. Kristof. Like you, my research is about inequality, but to them, we are “coastal elites.” I cannot count the number of my “coastal elite” friends eager to “understand” or give sympathy to these folks. My eyes cannot roll farther back.
Instead of giving sympathy to these people, how about being better neighbors, allies, and activists to the Black and Brown folks struggling to better their lives here in New York? That’s energy better spent.
13
As he has done many times earlier Kristof - without denying the importance of personal responsibility - reminds us of the equal, perhaps greater, importance of social responsibility
This piece brings to mind a song by Phil Ochs - the protest singer-songwriter of the 1960 - "There But For Fortune." One of the four verses relates the depression of one in jail. Another a homeless person who has lost hope. A third a habitual drunk with a bleak future. Each verse ends with "There but for fortune go you or I."
Ochs got it then; Kristof gets it now. Do we collectively?
3
After reading the first article, the fact that bothered me the most was that only one of the brothers and sisters had graduated from high school, they had all been drop outs. This is a community failure. Knowing that there is a family where the teens are not finishing school, one right after the other, is a huge flag. That's a problem that school administrator are paid to figure out, that school boards should have on top of their agenda. We can point a lot of fingers in a lot of different directions, but that direction is very clear and obvious. Now, it's been some years, but I'd like to know what are the people who are paid very well in government jobs to get their young people across the graduation finish line in Yamhill County?
4
We all have free will.
The drug doesn't make you take it. The food doesn't make you eat it.
Addiction is a choice, a decision not to deal, to avoid or delay, to feel...there are a lot of starters.
Before you become too outraged, consider the possibility that I might know what I’m talking about.
If you don't take responsibility for your actions, if you always look for an excuse, you will never come to terms with reality and what caused the abuse in the first place.
13
@Raz You certainly have a point. However, some of these people who turn to drugs to cope have co-occurring serious mental illnesses, which are definitely not a choice. Would that I could fully cure my biological depression, anxiety, and adhd. And yet I chose food as my drug of choice rather than drugs to cope. My death march may be slower but I would say that it is just as dangerous. One day you think you can conquer the world. Another you can't get out of bed. Don't be so quick to judge. You never know what someone is going through. And I noticed you referred to free will. If this is your idea of showing faith in a good and loving God, you may want to rethink that. If only we as a nation could be all in this together. If working-class and poor people of all races worked together, things would change. Dr. King said that more than 50 years ago and that is why he lost his life so young. If only then and if only now.
6
@KS
We are not biological robots.
I utterly reject biological causes for ADHD, depression, bipolar, etc.
Are people ADHD because of malfunctioning brain synapses, or are malfunctioning synapses a result and manifestation of behavior?
Many psychologists, and me, believe the latter.
Studies have supported the hypothesis that online gaming, for instance, changes brain function.
Of course, if the causes of these conditions are not biological, but learned behavior, how can doctors and pharmaceutical companies justify prescribing their medications? It cuts into their bottom line.
Also, people would have to step up and accept responsibility for their behavior. It's much easier to have an excuse...it's not my fault.
1
In 1977 a space probe, Voyager 1, was launched with a mission to study "the outer solar system." A Golden Record is on board Voyager 1 which, after 42 years, 4 months, and 13 days, is still in touch with planet earth.
The Golden Record is a "gold-plated audio-visual" disc with sounds, images, voices in a multitude of languages, and music that represent the massive diversity of life here on earth. And it was sent in the event the spacecraft is "ever found by intelligent life forms from other planetary systems."
I was reminded of that stunning expression of possibility, hope, and friendship by the NASA scientists and US government, in a sweet movie on Amazon, "Troop Zero."
At the end of the movie excerpts of the Golden Record are played. It includes a child's sweet voice saying "Hello from the children on planet earth." Somehow, in the current context of hate, rancor, and fear that innocent greeting from 42 years ago touched me deeply.
Mr. Kristof, your work inspires me as well. We're shown the need for all of us to do better in expressing possibility, hope, and friendship. Thank you.
1
Nice straw men, Mr. Kristof...Shortened life expectancy for those in a zip code in North Philadelphia, and unions being undermined by official governmental policy...
But straw is the material used to make them up!
The first is demolished by Dr. Ben Carson, the very person that you are trying to set up in your argument.
Dr. Carson grew up in a poverty-stricken Detroit that was beset by some of the worst violence and most devastating economic conditions in America in the latter half of the 20th Century. Carson went on to be a most distinguished NEUROSURGEON at one of the finest hospitals in the WORLD.
Dr. Carson deigned to use his God-given talents in ways that were advantageous to himself as well as to the world. That is what "personal responsibility" is all about.
And as for the unions? Well, in industries where there was serious competition, the unions had a hand in their own destruction.
Steel and autos became too expensive to create in the United States because the unions geenmailed the companies into giving contracts that were, at best, unwise, and more often destructive of the basic interests of viability for the company and the employee.
Perhaps it is time for you nabobs to stop bleating and to start working to find solutions to these problems that might actually achieve that which you see as necessary WITHOUT destroying that which needs no change.
11
Wonderful anecdote about Dr. Carson, but that doesn’t make data. It’s the exception that proves the rule!
9
@The Owl , Dr Carson appears to be one of those who used some forms of public assistance/aid to become successful, and who then decides to pull up the ladder an deny others the opportunity granted to him.
14
@The Owl: So, the success of one person against great odds "proves" that the entire system is working and that everyone simply has to emulate Ben Carson? Good grief. I won't say anything more, because these types of shallowly conceived opinions infuriate me to the point of rudeness, and my personal goal right now is to be less insulting to those with whom I do not agree. But I will leave it by saying that could not agree with you less.
11
In my opinion, your valid social scientists would do well to perform an objectively rigorous Root Cause Investigation and Analysis on the problems described.
My researchers have conducted such an investigation of your country and it revealed individual causations that, if listed, would consume many pages. BUT, when filtered down to about five fundamental causes, they concluded that current, somewhat primative human behaviours are a major root-cause.
Perhaps in another hundred or so years humans will have evolved beyond the primative level they are now. Perhaps.
2
Another word for social responsibility is patriotism. I believe patriotism means wanting a good life for all your fellow Americans. I'm doing well personally, but many of my fellow Americans are struggling. That's why I'm voting for Bernie Sanders. #NotMeUs
15
@Zep, that's why I'm voting g for Elizabeth Warren.
5
When one has no safety net, one mistake can have drastic consequences. Trump has had 6 bankruptcies. Where would he be without endless safety nets? There but for fortune...
29
I think the disease of our lack of compassion began earlier than social Darwinism. I think it began with the Puritanism present at the founding of this country. I see the evil remnants of it every day still in our country, from racism to our compulsion to work until we drop, regardless of what this lifestyle does to our kids, our health, our lack of personal satisfaction. Work for the night is coming. If you do something wrong, you should not be corrected or helped, but punished, be it mocked, beaten, jailed, or burnt at the stake. Kids beginning at age 5 or 6 lug homework in oversized backpacks home every night, thus driving home the lesson that work is never done, that even though we no longer put children in workhouses, we still must not allow them time to be children. Think about this, and you won’t wonder why some can’t or won’t Krupp up, why they turn to drugs or aberrant behavior for relief.
6
Nick
You do the country an enormous disservice when you blame “Congress” for inaction and punitive policies towards the poor. Please let go the inane and dishonest both-sidesism false equivalence narrative that has muddied and debased our public discourse.
It is not “Congress” that has failed and abandoned our citizenry, it is the Republican Party, that serves only the rich. By neglecting to speak this truth, you obscure the real cause of our predicament you help to perpetuate their cruelty. Nick, please follow the highest calling of your profession and tell the truth about why we are trapped in this nightmare, a Republican Party that cares nothing for our poorest people and everything for billionaires and the deluded, angry minority who have been duped into voting for it.
7
Thank you for this follow up article. I have found many Americans, middle class, upper middle class, otherwise liberal, are also extremely judgemental.
If you are suffering you only need to get deepak and Oprah’s new app- or maybe you should really get a makeover. I have found that the income inequality between my friends and I has grown over the last ten years since the crash. The poorer I get, the less I can relate to others.
The secret and all of those liberal and conservative thoughts that “God” or more liberal “the universe” wanted you to have this money and success - all of these things and the vacations too!
As I find myself more impoverished, I am
More socially isolated. As I am. about to lose my house after never missing a mortgage payment in 20 years, hanging on, super educated and super talented but exhausted from all ive done to make a living and create security and how often that fails when you do not have family money- family backing.
I see the missing equation in my life that is in those of friends I formerly felt close to: family assets and property ownership of their parents- backup when things really go wrong - ( Fire, mental health issues, a child w suicidal thoughts, divorce, one professional project that went into ones own savings, etc).
When there is no money cushion, life is very different. I find socially one has to redefine who their friends are bc the ones who grew up better off and have never struggled will completely abandon you.
9
Morality of grace? Who boy, you are laying it on thick!
Capitalism of Inclusion? A contradiction in terms.
This essay is the worst I've ever read by you.
Post-war we included white people only. The protest you are making appears to be because suddenly the Republican lack of social concern grew to include white people.
Morality, schmorality.
You want to help others, you have to stop pretending capitalism cares about anyone. Ayn Rand didn't, neither did Milton Friedman.
Yes, the government ought to help everyone of every race. But don't try to sell it with schmaltz.
4
With compassion and grace here at the end of the day, and with respect, I believe the Knapps killed their own selves. Yes it is sad and painful. Yes they were ignorant and weak. And yes, they are still deserving of some dignity, as all of us, and every living thing is. No need to be smug and disdainful about the Knapps.
2
Thank you for this wonderfu, insightful and much needed article. Having lived in Europe I have always had to explain this American cultural phenomenon to bewildered Europeans who don't understand how Americans can let their fellow citizens die in the street without health insurance and without pity. Again and again I explain that it is cultural: from a young age, American culture, in an insidious way, tells you that there are only winners and losers and if you don't have the money to pay for your own health insurance, etc., you're a loser and it's your fault and you should be ashamed to ask for help. This shaming is cruel and clever in the sense that it profits big Pharma, big business and the government while allowing them to escape any responsibility because the individual American sees it as his or her fault or the fault of his or her peer who must be a loser. That's why many God-fearing Americans can leave church on Sunday and complain at dinner that their tax dollars should not help others. I have always found that hypocrisy stunning but I now link it to this deep cultural point of view that is uniquely American and uniquely disturbing, undermining the US in the long-term.
13
"... gratuitous cruelty posturing as policy."
That in a nutshell is the gist of most religions.
Religion holds a view that all of us are sinners the day we're born and heap shame upon everyone. But for 10% of your income you can "get right with God" and have eternal salvation; otherwise you are doomed to the damnation you deserve.
Religion is the root cause of human suffering.
10
It saddened me to read the first article about your friends. But then to see the comments you described--mean, angry, and mocking; lacking empathy and even going so far as to credit natural selection; it's profoundly depressing. And it's so much worse in the time of Trump, who revels in a multitude of lies, who thrives on hatred, and delights in torturing anyone who opposes him. The most distressing and utterly depressing thing about him is that his tremendous popularity means that my country is so very far from what I once believed it to be that it is utterly unrecognizable. As one who has battled depression and suicidal impulses, I can say without hesitation that the deaths of despair are provoked and increased by the selfish, barbaric narcissism of our president, whose rage tweets and open contempt for the rule of law only pulls more planks out of the scaffolding beneath our feet, as it also tightens the noose around our necks. His whole identity is hate-based. In times past, when all else failed, the pride of living in a great country could sustain me another day and even offer an outsized source of hope. Now, the actions those who hold our highest offices is a source of shame and utter despair (putting children in cages, pardoning murderers, mocking disease; an endless list of horrors) I'm filled with suicidal desire to separate myself from so much bile, anger and hatred. My demise would make these trolls cheer. What happened to this country? Who are these evil people?
7
Overall, the United States is a nation of hateful, selfish bigots.
Our entire national ethos is built on the idea that I should be looking out for myself and nobody else, and anyone who suffers deserves it, because they should have just worked harder and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Why is anyone surprised that Americans respond this way to a story about despair?
7
Nicholas
This country has no compassion for people less fortunate than the haves.
look at the cold eye we turn towards the incarcerated, the addicted, the mentally ill or the immigrants
we should all remember...there but for the grace of God goes I.
We’ve become a nation of uncompassionate hard hearts led by an ogre who has no heart at all.
4
And let us remember a time when we did not have TV and social media coming into our homes to give us meanness, conflict, violence, graphic sex and betrayals. Our children get a steady diet of this.
2
"There for the grace of God goes I." Another forgotten phrase from our dark past when people believed in God. "Things happen." has replaced it. Why bring God into the equation. You might spend your life wondering why God is doing it to you when its really things.
I often complain about our media celebrating drug and alcohol excess. You might think it persons free choice to gravitate to addiction or they're weak or stupid or came from the wrong family. Fact is some people self destruct no matter what their environment or because of it or both. Why encourage it?
I was asked by a Progressive friends why i didn't use drugs. I said look at all the misery it caused. Look at what it's doing too countries like Columbia, Mexico and Jamaica. It would help if they didn't use it. They said it wasn't their problem. Legalize it. But if they didn't use it?
Moral people have difficulties in seeing their own flaws. Bill Maher wants his medical insurance lowered by punishing everyone who caused their own medical conditions. Look out diabetics he's coming after you. Bill for the record owns a 3000 dollar bong and is not aware of possible links with weed and long cancer.
Soon they'll have bogus genetic screening to you decide if you should have a child. Don't worry in a Progressive Society it will be "voluntary". No one will ever decide that for you. But if it doesn't go the way you planed well remember "things happen".
My cohort of big city liberals have been so focussed on such a limited (although vitally important) set of issues — immigration, LGBT, racism, police brutality that we have ignored the desperate lives Kristoff speaks of. How could this happen? We have labeled these fellow citizens as racists, ignorant yokels and xenophobes without really knowing them and their struggles. They are us— our fellow citizens who need to be heard and helped.
3
Not to mention the killing of the lumber industry by the upper West Side environmentalists for the sake of a "endangered" spotted owl. Blue collar jobs by thousands were destroyed and with them the the lives of those families What nasty hubris and arrogance.
2
I will share this whenever the narrative of castigation arises! Thank you !
By "friends" you mean those people you grew up with and then saw perhaps once after you became a famous and handsomely-paid Times columnist? And who doesn't grasp that a dearth of decent jobs for the low-skilled creates social problems?
There's a piece coincident with yours, published in The Journal, wherein Harvard's Edward Glaeser points to the public policies that impede young and lesser-skilled people's ability to buy or build an affordable home, that restrict their access to jobs, etc. If liberals want to make the case for government, it might help if they begin by advocating for the erasure of policies that hinder the attainment of the ends they ostensibly seek.
The idea that we should arbitrarily slash into the -- yes, bloated -- military budget in order to engage in social engineering that has a terrible track record (see Amity Shlaes's "Great Society," not just Binyamin Applebaum's review thereof) is something one finds forever repeated in these pages but is not less absurd for that. ... We can play the William Julius Wilson game till the cows come home. We really don't entirely understand social rot, and given the complexity of humankind, that's unsurprising.
You claim that people have been told it's their fault. By whom? Perhaps it'd be better if they believed it was; but something tells me that even if they did, you wouldn't. The Left's attack on everything that's "bourgeois" must share some blame. And you, Nicholas? Who's responsible for your material success?
2
Republicans have always peddled this “personal responsibility” trope. And unfortunately so did President Obama at times. I think it’s a cop-out to blame a person for their own misfortune, especially since so much of life is basically luck (good and bad).
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” — Charles Dickens
5
The tragedies of the Knapp generation are nothing compared to the tragedies of our lower classes to come. On the front page of the Times itself, McKinsey, not Marx, projected that fully a net 47% of ALL American jobs would be lost to tech by 2050. Unless we start radically rethinking our political economy with a Bernie, a Yang, or a Steyers in our White House in 2021, the suicides of despair will skyrocket, as will the odds of bloody revolution against the rich projected by Ray Dalio and allegorically dramatized in the brilliant movie satire, Parasite.
5
First step is for families like your friends to stop voting for trump and his ilk.
4
Oh, my my, you are a better human than I, Mr. Kristof. I’m pretty sure if I write what I really think of these zero-compassion, sorry excuses for human beings who worship at the conservative church of Personal Responsibly, my account might be shut down. Here’s to hoping there’s something to that whole karma thing. #meanpeoplesuck
4
Amen, brother Nick. This is the America I want.
2
It’s interesting, reading the perspective of commenters. If this were published in a different paper, with a different set of readers, readers perhaps closer to the economic and social circumstances of the Knapps I think there world be far less sympathy. I want to feel sorry for the Knapps. Really, what a mess. But I also want to know how much harm meth-cooking son did to other families as he distributed his “talent” through his community. How much mercy did this family have on their own children, as they drank, and smoked, injected and left cocaine out by their little children? There’s a great and terrible quote in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, when the mother in the story goes to thank the bartender for a wreath the bartender had sent to her alcoholic husband’s funeral. “He was free, white, and over 21.” no one made these choices for them.
5
I believe you will find most of the social Darwinists are men and Republicans, and the compassion is coming from women and Democrats.
4
I am just wondering if they had only two kids instead of 5 if they would've been able to pull themselves and their children out of poverty or at least would've had a better chance.
7
The best refutation of everything Nicholas Kristoff has written is himself. If he could become the author of books and a columnist for the New York Times having come from the same town and circumstances as those he writes about, why couldn't they also achieve similar things? He says personal responsibility doesn't explain the different outcomes but if it wasn't that, then what was it? It can't be the circumstances because he experienced the same ones as the people he writes about, and yet they ended up in early graves and he has thrived.
5
This (white) evangelical pastor is appalled to see so many fellow Christians publicly espousing what amounts to devil-take-the-hindmost social Darwinism. Their ideological idolatry grieves the Holy Spirit and brings shame on the Name of Christ.
4
And do the same people who blame the Knapps for their dispair agree with Forbes that Kylie Jenner is self-made?
5
Thank you!
It is something of a joke when so many Americans define themselves as Christian when they do nothing to help their fellow man. Oh, they are quick to castigate those who have abortions, but feed the poor, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, protect the helpless - forget it.
Trump is a good president for these people, a sexual predatory, a philanderer, crude, a cheat, a bully, a coward, a man who belittles those with disabilities BUT HE IS AGAINST ABORTION!!!!
He is as good a Christian as his followers.
7
I wished to read this response to nasty comments so badly I became a subscriber to NYT. I, too, agree with you. I’ve long said that governments diminishing support services and investment in its people will shake out an ugly future with more crime, poverty and destitution. What you describe and the sanctimonious response is happening in Canada as well. It may not be foremost in our headlines or politics, but sadly closely following.
I have a hard tome dealing with this mindset and difficult if articulating a succinct response. Your driving analogy certainly helps me think of how best to continue the debate.
I hope those of us who think like you can cause a groundswell that overtakes the hatred and pompous attitudes; and, instead realize that all deserve dignity and empathy.
5
Nick, move back to Oregon. Get yourself elected governor and make change. It’s so easy to cast stones at society from your computer in your upscale New York home. Instead, show us the way. Put your money where your mouth is.
4
Theirs.
Lack of sympathy and responsibility are the symptoms of a broken American society that is due to the broken education system.
The problem lies in the fact that our experts have still not figured out that the brain and mind are two separate entities. They lump the brain and mind as just the mind. As a result, we only have mind education and brain education is not only missing, the brain is miseducated. We upbring our children on the belief that each one is the best. This creates a trophy self-image that expects more from the self and even demands more from the others and the government. America is a trophy self-image driven country. This part phony self-image messes up all life. It creates a desire for more and more. It even screws up relationships. Why do you think America has such a huge divorce rate. Relationships are based on the belief of being a trophy. It is like my behavior is equal to fifty cents but I think I am a dollar. So I give fifty cents and say here have a dollar!
Emotional Health (EH) is the foundation of a thriving society and is the foundation of health and yet there is no testing or manual for EH. EH is the function of the brain and as brain education is messed up it messes up EH.
I have figured out a simple formula to create all the attributes of wisdom through EH.
https://medium.com/@sajidalikhan2/wisdom-3-0-b6e03324e64a
https://medium.com/@sajidalikhan2/the-biggest-health-crisis-facing-america-is-the-emotional-health-crisis-12fe58252f0e
@Sajidkhan
Gimme a break. You talk about "American society" as if it were some sort of monolith.
2
When we thought there was a wide-open country, abundant with flora, fauna, arable land, fresh water, and minerals, all for the taking, the country prospered with a motto of personal responsibility. It was thought that anyone who showed enterprise could get ahead. Those who failed to take advantage were allowed to fall by the wayside as there were always new immigrants eager to try their luck.
Today virtually all arable land has been developed. We have greatly diminished the flora and fauna, and recognize that fresh water and minerals are limited. We know that any further development has to be monitored to protect the environment, hemming in anyone who has enterprise to take advantage of the land’s abundance.
It used to be that one could start a small store, but now one has to compete with chain stores and internet sites.
It used to be that one could drop out of high school to get a good paying factory job. Now a high school diploma is not enough.
We, Americans, need to recognize that the days of naively exploiting a seemingly endless amount of land and its bounty is pretty much over. So, too, are the days when you could get a middle class job with little education or when you could successfully operate your own retail store. Instead of viewing anyone who cannot achieve a state of security, on his or her own, as someone who could be replaced with an illegal immigrant, we should deport illegal immigrants and direct our resources to helping our own citizens.
I'm so sick of the hypocrisy of people who profess to be "pro-life" and "Christian" when they cavalierly dismiss human suffering, and worse, continually vote for politicians who cut programs and access to services that save lives.
How many addicts want help, only to be put on months-long wait lists, or turned away from programs and therapies due to inability to pay? How much taxpayer money is wasted on locking people up, tearing families apart, and putting kids in foster care? How much money is passed on to health care consumers when uninsured addicts end up in hospitals with no ability to pay?
Most importantly, how many lives are ruined so some lemon-sucking plutocrat who gets taxpayer salary and benefits can feel morally superior by punishing the poor and the sick?
7
I think George Saunders nailed it here: “America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.” (from The Braindead Megaphone)
7
Every Democratic candidate needs to state your points loud and clear, Mr. Kristof. The premise of personal responsibility enables people who are well off to abdicate any social responsibility, any concern for their fellow human beings. It allows us to blame those who need our support, even though that need most often results from personal greed that goes either unfettered or abetted by government. Such beliefs and practices have long roots in Calvinism's premise that people are born predestined for salvation or for hell. We must become conscious of the origins of our prejudices and dedicate ourselves anew to loving our neighbors.
4
If bad choices make people poor, then as long as I make okay choices, I'm safe. But if it's the economy, then I'm at risk, too. How much more comfortable it is to think my choices will protect me.
7
Mr. Kristoff, I read the 1st article, but did not read the comments. What stuck with me, is that none of your Knapp friends graduated from high school. They obviously had resources, the oldest son got his Mustang for his 16th birthday after all. My thoughts on the first article were to blame the parents. I can see one child having issues and dropping out, but all 5 of them? They were still young then and I'm thinking hadn't started the habits that led to their ultimate demise. You were there, you graduated and thrived. What was the difference? Family support, expectations, just plain luck? I agree, their story is a tragedy, but I think the reasons started well before the possible explanations you offer.
3
@Western Gal If none of them finished high school, were they all dyslexic perhaps, and were never given the right interventions to help them learn to read? Runs in families, affects 20% of the population, and is largely ignored by the U.S. education system. Up to 80% of some prison populations are dyslexics.
3
There's rarely a day go by that I don't think of how much luck plays a role in determining our fate. Yes, many people overcome bad upbringing, lousy genetics, and just rotten luck. Personal choices do matter. However if you are fortunate enough to be born (or adopted) into a supportive, loving family, your odds go up considerably in overcoming terrible choices or just plain old bad luck.
The people that have responded in such Darwinian terms are indicative of the zero sum mentality that has sickened our society.
3
Nature is a much harder judge of behavior than is humanity.
it doesn't shed a tear or miss a step when any living thing dies. Death, is part of life.
Blame, guilt, etc. are human afflictions that are only absent in the minds of psychopaths and sociopaths.
The rest of us have to deal with the emotional issues described here.
But the fact is, they do, kill themselves, and they do have a choice. They could choose not to. The ultimate responsibility lies with them.
But that's a simple fact, uncomplicated by "would have's, could have's and should have's".
@Objectivist A true objectivist would also understand that people may be unable to see that they have a choice. I hope you never have to make such a choice, even though you might become humanized by the experience— if you survive it.
5
All lives have value. The least we can do to respect the dead, all dead, is to speak kindly of them and to regret their passing.
It's cold here tonight. Today I saw a middle aged woman in decent clothes sitting on the sidewalk pawing through her plastic bag of belongings. Our country is like this because that is the way we have chosen to be.
7
One does not need to agree with the harsh comments of people like Jonathan or Ajax to see that you are badly wrong.
The fault lies with people like YOU who are constantly dissing personal responsibility and constantly suggesting that the "state" do more. But the state gets its resources from people who are not doing drugs and not killing themselves. It is unfair to keep putting more and more burden on people who act responsibly, while pretending that we are asking the state to do more.
The problem with America is that we are drunk on freedom and drunk on individual rights. We need to become aware that while these two are important, they cannot do their job without an emphasis on personal responsibility.
Normally this last would come from the Republicans and conservative Democrats. But Republicans seem to be controlled by our irrational president and the conservative Democrats have been cowed by the progressives. So there is no one left to teach America what it needs to learn.
5
Except the point here is not that we are overburdened, it’s that We The People - vastly undertaxed among developed nations - need to do much more when it comes to public education and standards by which children are raised. Trouble with capitalism is it has never figured out how to deal with those unwilling or unable to compete ... and it has no provision for those children stuck at the starting line by circumstances they could do nothing about, or those repressed by the rich and powerful as they struggle through life. Christian teachings, the words of Jesus, supposedly address this, but for too many Christian capitalists choose to ignore that part.
3
@Mark S "We The People - vastly undertaxed among developed nations - need to do much more when it comes to public education and standards by which children are raised."
True indeed. But my experience with Europeans, especially from Northern Europe is that they have a much greater sense of personal responsibility than Americans. This greater sense of personal responsibility I have also seen in young people from China. Ido not know that China has high rates of taxation.
Personal responsibility is actively discouraged by many Americans, hopefully not you. We use "Europe does a lot, America does too little, so feel free to mess up your life and it won't be your fault" is the message we send our young people.
1
Thank you for your cogent, logical response to these harsh critics, who seem to lack compassion, humanity, and indeed an understanding of the odds.
When I come up against such a brutal response to the pain of others, I’m too often stopped dead in my tracks, unable to gather my wits for a thoughtful response. For example, I was recently debating someone who was arguing against the affordable care act, claiming how much it cost her/him. I pointed out that in West Virginia people who were formerly Trump supporters and very against ‘Obamacare’ three years ago, now realized the tremendous advantages that the ACA gives them them and are desperate to hang on to it, with its special advantages for people suffering from Black lung.
My ‘opponent’ wrote that those stupid enough to go down the mines as a career-choice deserved all that befell them; that s/he saw no reason her/his premiums should rise on their behalf! I was shocked into silence.. but also felt that such a person wasn’t reachable by reasoned debate.
Thank you for not giving up but providing such strong debating points.
7
Those who hide behind “personal responsiblity” are dodging their own terror of winding up in a tough spot themselves. These fear-driven people are always the first to condemn others who have fallen on hard times. The Republican Party is their refuge—until or unless, of course, they can no longer “pull their own weight.” Then they are demonized, too, by all the fear-mongering fake “christians” also drawn into that benighted party. And all those righteous people go on their way thanking their vindictive “god” they are better than others because of their “personal responsibility.” Until, that is, they need compassion themselves.
No one “makes” someone smoke cigarettes or inject heroin. But when someone suffers the consequences of their poor choices is when my compassion as a very weak Christian kicks in. Blaming someone for having lung cancer, for example, has more to do with the blamer’s own fear of mortality than with any moral failing of the afflicted person. Blaming someone for feeling driven to medicate the overwhelming psychic pain they struggle with is not doing anything helpful at all.
8
"Auto crashes often are a result of speeding, drinking or texting. If we coddle drivers with airbags and padded dashboards, and have ambulances ready to rescue them, they’ll never learn to drive responsibly. Better to implant spikes in dashboards so they appreciate consequences!"
Mr. Kristof forgot to complete the analogy by the specific recommendation to let them bleed freely, to death if so be it. Unless, that is, they called the ambulance themselves -- and can pay for it.
3
Dear Nicholas & allies - I agree, 100%. Yet, after 52 years of observation, study & deep contemplation, I realize that people can only consider narratives that include thinkable concepts & realities. In other words, those of us stuck with a deficient paradigm can't think about or understand bioethical truths of being. Remember, a cultural paradigm is a mental model of reality that can be pretty accurate or a purely personal mental fiction. What is it & how does it maintain an ecocidal status quo?
Our mental/social paradigms are made of definitions, beliefs, assumptions, opinions, illusions & whatever deceptions we choose to accept as truths/realities.
To realize the negative potential, recall the paradigms of Hitler, Stalin, Mao or any ecocidal psychopath in an office today--and the blind loyalty of their supporters or fellow stockholders.
Then consider this: Carl Sagan once said he thought most of us are too easily bamboozled, and the worse & longer they're bamboozled, the less they want to know about it.
So, what can be done about deficient paradigms installed in the wetware of voters & stockholders who support ecocidal kleptocracy? After 52 years, I still don't know.
What I do know is that without a cultural paradigm upgrade, we will suffer increasingly atrocious symptoms of dystopia, not an ecotopian civilization with justice, liberty & prosperity for all, either here or anywhere else on Earth.
Thanks, good luck, etc. ~ M
We all have free will. Addiction is a choice...a decision not to deal, maybe to fill a void, or...
Before you get too outraged, consider the possibility that I know what I'm talking about.
1
@Raz
Raz, I hope you have overcome addiction. Nothing should diminish the power of that.
But because you may have had that experience does not mean you can speak for all addicts.
Your story is yours. Their stories are different.
6
Reading about the Knapp family suddenly made me realize that this is exactly why so many blacks have struggled in poverty in this country despite the many opportunities. If you are black and cannot get a job to support your family because you are black it destroys your self esteem leading to poor choices. The Knapps and other white people are going through now what black people have experienced for generations. Only now, in this economy, just being white isn’t enough to succeed. This is also creating even more resentment against minorities in this country, hence the rise of Trump and his disaffected supporters,
Our country needs to strengthen its social safety nets and tackle income inequality and improve our educational system. We are currently in a vortex of decline that is rapidly becoming irreversible if we don’t act soon. Trump is not the answer. Trump is solely for his rich friends and stuffing his own pockets with tax payer money. Tax dollars that only the poor and middle class pay anymore.
2
The harsh judgments and blame expressed by some readers in response to this tragic story of the Knapp family brought to mind what for me is among the most disheartening aspects of the Trump presidency: that meanness, cruelty and lack of compassion, rather than being expressed privately with some shame attached to harboring such ugly feelings, are now proclaimed loudly and proudly at campaign rallies, on social media, and in the comments sections of newspapers. This president has made me look at my fellow citizens--my neighbors-- differently, and not in a good way. These days, I find myself working extra hard to see the good in people. For this I blame the guy some call "president." Sad.
2
You mention in passing children who leave school unable to read , write or compute. The implication is just more money will solve it. Perhaps a look at where the money for K through 12 schooling is spent might be called for.
Yes. Most members of my family are like the people who wrote you nasty letters.
The logic is circular: How you end up demonstrates whether you took personal responsibility or not.
And "personal responsibility" extends to a ridiculous length. People who didn't, say, go to college apparently aren't entitled to live. Never mind that WE NEED plumbers and carpenters and such.
I've come to the conclusion that this idea, held beyond all reasonable bounds, is based on selfishness. Because if we had to make a real assessment of our society, we might have to do something about it or extend a helping hand to such people.
2
Mr. Kristof thank you for your first column and thank you for calling out the haters in the second column. I am appalled by those responses. What our government has today, and what Mr. Trump personifies, is an utter lack of compassion. I also believe that what these haters share with Mr. Trump is any real human experience with desperate people. They are all, like Mr. Trump, sheltered and naïve to the real world.
2
American idealism has always been more of a promise than a reality. But generations of us thought it was attainable.
Now, we have a political class that sees compassion as weakness, empathy as foolish and generosity as witless and wasteful.
What happens in the next few weeks matters for the rest of our lives. It always has.
4
Could this be driven in part also by the Evangelical doctrine of prosperity? if God wants one to be prosperous and one misses the mark, is it due to personal failing? I think not, but many of those hateful comments received could be driven by such malignant thinking.
6
Your article and your rebuttal were right on target. How have we developed among some of our fellow Americans such a cult of cruelty and lack of care for our fellow citizens?
2
This is a false choice. The reality is much more nuanced. Just as important as the stimulus (probably more so) is our reaction to it. We do have free will. And I am in favor of helping those in need whether society created their poor choices or they did it to themselves. If someone comes from a very privileged background with every advantage known to man and they opt to shoot heroin in their veins I would want to help them too. The dirty little secret in all of this goes like this - life is pretty much what we make of it. This column is just wrong.
1
@Jack
Thanks for the most sensible observations today.
In the last two thousand years, it seems that many have evolved from being quick to pick up stones to cast at those they judged less worthy into continually carrying them around in their pockets.
This article reminds me of some lines from a John Prine song: "It ain't such a long drop. Don't stammer. Don't stutter. From the diamonds in the sidewalk. To the dirt in the gutter."
Or, in other words, there but for God's grace, go I.
3
I once ran homeless shelters for a living and can tell you for a fact that in my long experience most homeless people were not addicted to drugs or alcohol.
My rough guess would be that at most 30-40 percent of them were.
Mental problems made up maybe another 20 percent.
The rest of them were homeless for the same reasons you and I would be, lousy parents, bad educations, not enough skills, not enough money.
I can’t remember ever encountering a single one of the men and women I met ever having the bad judgment and evil intent to want to inflict a man like Trump on the country.
What worries me most about the future is that we now appear to have many of them.
10
How many middling achievers gain admission to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc. because of connections or legacy. The system is truly rigged.
4
For those that blame lack of character or poor choices : Would you switch your newborn with a billionaires child ? What would be the result for EACH child ?
Still so sure about blaming ???
1
It is deeply disturbing that we live in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the developed world because (1) we threw poor people, usually brown and black,in prison for minor, nonviolent drug offences,and (2) we built and filled those prisons so poor white people in rural areas could have jobs.
1
"My friends the Knapps made mistakes. Of course they did."
It also appears - from the photograph and from the article - that there may have also been no father in the family.
I know it's politically incorrect to point this out, but if there's no real father in a family, the children are in trouble.
3
Any person who has had a modicum or more of success in life will, if they’re honest, recognize the contributions at crucial moments, of parents, teachers, neighbors, friends, mentors, strangers, et al, and..... random chance. (One can take advantage of luck, but you don’t make your own.)
No one is “self-made.”
4
I have to admit fighting a knee-jerk reaction of “they made their bed” when first reading about the Knapps. But then I thought about my own and others’ narrow escapes, whether through luck or others or simply a willingness to ask for assistance. I wish people didn’t vote/act against their interests and remembered that many aspects of life mean handing off to the next generation, but we have to keep trying anyway — with an open heart.
1
The obvious irony here is many of the same “personal responsibility” Americans label themselves Christian, and want to legitimize it (through policy) that America is a Christian nation.
3
The religious belief of “free will” is responsible for our society’s lack of empathy for people struggling with mental disorders. (Additionally, our natural greediness shaped by evolutionary processes is another factor, but that’s a subject for another time). There is simply no scientific justification that our “will” is in anyway “free” of our brain or our brain’s interaction with the environment, beginning with the prenatal environment in our mother’s wombs. You are your brain. In short, Nicholas Kristoff cannot escape his “Nicholas Kristoffness.” This does not mean we are robots. We are biological beings who can change, but it takes both internal reflection and certain environmental influences to bring change about. Regarding drug addiction, our society and government should be proactive in offering resources for help and rehabilitation compared to today’s neglect and pick-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps worldview. But that can only come about through empathy, understanding what causes these psychological maladies, and what can mitigate or cure them—the latter two require research investment; the former, and understanding of what it means to be a human being.
Mr Kristoff - thanks for both these thoughtful and relevant articles. You probably already know of this book, but I recommend The Age of Responsibility- Luck Choice and The Welfare State by Yascha Mounk
Amen.
Our nation, unfortunately, is governed by individuals who incite base human qualities. Meanness spews from their pores. Meanness must release an adrenaline rush. Yea, that's it. The mean people who demand that all others take personal responsibility are getting their high being mean! Just a different addiction.
We can only pray that someday the mean people will be shamed enough by the people who practice unconditional love, all day, every day.
Please never stop using your pen to champion the cause of the vulnerable.
1
Excellent article. Thank you!
1
There is an ugly all too American political trend to demand bootstrap cures. That phrase is by the way a joke, nobody can hoist himself with his own bootstraps. It's impossible, that's is what the phrase was supposed to mean.
Those hurt the worst are told to get over it and fix themselves. Too often they are told this by others who benefited from hurting them. Aka "status quo" that has shifted, and is liked by those who won on the shift.
4
As sad as it is to say this many of those who show empathy for your friends and are willing to temper the personal responsibility argument would not do so if they were people of color. What Trump has shown us is that the US is a deeply racist country. You offer a compelling argument about inequality and class but in the US where many people of color were actually slaves racism must always be seen as a major factor in any discussion of personal responsibility and inequality. Ben Carson in all his misguided notions about poverty and personal responsibility still can not fully escape racist views regarding his own personal dignity as your friends, your wife, and I can just by being white. We thought we came a long way with Obama but it just took Trump to show the deep racism that still exists.
2
I read the first horrifying story of Nick's book, "Tightrope." From the Knapp kids' perspective, if you are cowering above the kitchen while your mean drunk father hits your mother, chases her out of the house, and shoots at her with a rifle, your choices, be those as they may, will be tainted by that experience. I think some of these writers are a little glib in blaming people for bad choices. All choices we make derive from the sum total of our experiences. Such awful experiences can limit our choices.
1
Yes, Nick...helping hands goes all the way back to the parable of the Good Samaritan, and before that there's the Golden Mean of "doing unto others."
Death is best left to our own fate, some sudden, some not quickly enough. The "morality of grace" can see us through...if we remove the stumps from our own eyes before we point out the faults of others.
"Ah, that our reach should exceed our grasp, or what's a heaven for," wrote Browning. Let's all keep reaching out till death do we part.
1
Psychology and Psychiatry have come a long way in the past century and still have a long way to go. But we are closer to seeing what despair is made of. Some people, and some families, have conditions that predispose them to despair and its many parts. We are beginning to understand the genetic predisposition to addiction and despair. De-funding science, de-funding medical science, and de-funding the NIH are all backward steps. Research and research alone will unlock knowledge about what causes addiction and despair, and research and reflection will will reveal the treatments that will help. We are not there yet. To de-fund science is the stupidest solution to the problem.
Those with most of the hoarded wealth do not want competition from below - capitalists hate competition ("anyone who says otherwise is selling something" - The Princess Bride) - hence their preoccupation with keeping society down and in their autocratic control - disguised as free-markets.
“The main problem they have is weakness of character.” Yes, they blame the poor to cover for the truly weakest characters of the land leading our nation into ruin and the abyss.
Ironic how the weakness of character of evangelical Christians claim “social Darwinism” to justify the depravity of their leaders at the top.
When will trumplicans and Republicans in Congress take "personal responsibility" for their trump? Will the majority of Americans finally take "personal responsibility" and vote?
"When we as a nation are willing to pay extra so that we can lock people up and rip apart their families, that’s gratuitous cruelty posturing as policy." Perfectly stated! That "gratuitous cruelty" also postures as piety allowing them to get away with such cruelty with impunity.
"Better to implant spikes in dashboards so they appreciate consequences!" Yes, I read something similar a long time ago - replacing airbags with spikes to get reckless drivers to drive responsibly.
Indeed, all the safety features now in cars as in democracy makes one believe they can now sleep behind the wheel and their vote and defy the laws of physics and our Constitutional protections until the real world ends it all.
2
How can one pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they don't have a pair of boots, or a pair a boots with hole in the soles, or when required to do heavy and dangerous work , boots without steel toes? Or the bootstraps have been cut by someone more powerful than they are.
It appears that the people who use this tired phrase would be satisfied that the boots be pulled by the ever-handy "invisible hand of the 'Free Market'".
3
Dear Mr. Kristoff. There is no “we” here. Only “they”. Did the neighbors you mourn support universal healthcare, more equitable taxation, and sympathize with minorities when they were beig arrested for crack confine use? Or did they term that as socialism and lack of moral character?
This is a great example of Darwinism. Everyone who can adapt has left and what if left behind are genes that should not be reproducing.
3
The corollary of its “their fault” theory is the equally toxic - and wrong : “I did it completely on my own” theory of success
aka see the attitudes of Trump et al
2
This is a beautifully written response to an article that should’ve made people feel compassion instead of disdain for the family you wrote about, and should’ve inspired people to work for change instead of using blame as a way to continue to turn a blind eye. Bravo! The spikes in the dashboard is a vivid and powerful analogy.
1
An excellent essay, cheapened somewhat by periodic references to a book on sale... and the author's plugging of same in the comments section.
2
It is ironic that the very same people who all too readily apply the doctrine of personal responsibility to explain people who live in poverty and die young, refuse to apply it to the President of the United States. He blames every single one of his problems on an ever expanding circle of other people.
2
These foklks who seem to lack compassion and empathy remind me of the old Benjiman Disraeli quote about his political opponent Gladstone. Disraeli said of Gladstone, "There but for the grace of God, goes God."
We authors (I'm the first one quoted) of "ugly" comments are right. Drug and alcohol use are voluntary choices. Really poor people don't have the money for them. Responsible people don't make those choices, even if they have the money. Hogarth depicted the consequences of bad choices nearly 300 years ago. They are choices, not fate.
Responsible people don't have illegitimate children; they get married instead.
I see immigrants from all over the world working hard and not falling into these traps. Some of them are poor, living ten to an apartment so they can send most of their earnings back home, some fearing immigration raids. They are models to emulate.
If a region's economic base disappears, move. The Hebrides were 90% depopulated nearly 200 years ago after the market for seaweed (their chief product) disappeared. If a Central American peasant can make a difficult and dangerous journey to the U. S. for irregular and poorly paid work, why cannot an out-of-work American who probably has access to an automobile and a cell phone move a few hundred miles?
2
Thank you for this important follow up about this family’s tragedy. At 71, I try to think, “Who benefits by promoting a particular point of view which then informs policy?” So in this case who benefits by painting all who are poor, or sick physically or mentally, or addicted, or disabled, or whatever condition you might think of as “weak in character and respond for their own suffering?” And then, “Who refuses to support compassionate assistance including food, safe housing, medical care to other suffering humans?” My answer: Those who hold power, whether a great deal or only a small amount, and who are afraid of losing what they themselves have even if what they have could help millions. Convincing them that their refusal is morally right absolves them of any shame they might otherwise feel for being greedy and mean. Not a very heartening view of Americans today in particular and sadly of humanity in general.
1
"Here in the United States, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine laid out a blueprint for reducing America’s child poverty by half, yet Congress and President Trump do nothing."
Actually they do worse than nothing, by labeling as socialist (as if it was a horrible word) people and programs attempting to solve this tragic problem, fearing a small loss to their obscene wealth.
3
Mr. Kristof often writes about people who have broken lives from war or poverty or other calamities. This story reminds me of people I worked with in a chicken processing plant while a teenager growing up in rural area.
Everyone working in the plant during the day or on the night shift was very poor and without much education. Later I worked as a paralegal at a poverty law center and did outreach to rural communities to pay for college before going to law school.
As a volunteer lawyer, I reviewed almost 12,000 domestic violence cases. So I have some experience working with very poor or dysfunctional families.
You cannot have a meaningful discussion about the issues raised by Kristof without taking into account genetics.
Research about human behavior and the effects of nurture vs nature has greatly advanced. Genes make us who we are by influencing how we reason and interact with the world around us, driving the way we select, modify, and even create our environment according to many researchers.
Working with poor families, I saw families who had a clean house, loved and disciplined their children, and did their best to feed and shelter them. Next door would be another family and their behavior would be as different as night and day.
I believe we can help people get out of poverty by better programs, but genetic differences are real and greatly influence behavior, and that is a reality that Mr. Kristof ignores in his article.
2
I recently saw the interview you and your wife had with Ali Velschi, which led me to buy your recent book and read this and other related articles. The rise of inequality since the
80s is stunning. Jobs have been outsourced abroad; education has been neglected;healthcare is often still regarded as a privilege and not a right; the cost of decent housing has outstripped many people's ability to pay, hence so much homelessness; people suffer physically and emotionally; eventually all these factors engender resignation or despair, so - predictably - many people turn to the things that will at least take the pain away, if only temporarily. Eventually, drugs/alcohol cause many more problems than they solve; incarceration or suicide may follow.
This is not a crisis of personal responsibility, in my opinion. It is a logical consequence of the politics of this country, the purpose of which at times seems to be to give more and more to those who do not need it and simultaneously to erode or destroy the social structure that might make it possible for others to gain some upward traction. I wish there were more space to write more, because a lot more could be said. Thank you for your article.
4
Thanks, Nicholas. A year ago this past week I introduced you at Calvin College's January Series (I compared you to Jesus, which may be memorable!). But speaking of Jesus: in my experience in also the church, the puffed-up "We are where we are because we're responsible people (unlike all those weak losers out there," say this because they forget a fundamental fact: we are are where we are by grace alone. And if I can revel in that glorious fact, then I should want to do all I can to extend this grace to others because if grace brings me joy, I want that joy to come to all. That is indeed the "morality of grace" of which you wrote here. It is THEE fundamental fact of my Christian faith. And curiously is is THEE first thing most people forget. Sigh. Thank you (and your wife) for your abiding good work in giving names and faces to the victims of despair.
2
I think this topic is one that is commonly overlooked by Americans for the simple fact that our government fails to address the issues faced by a huge percentage of citizens on the outdated perception that their struggles are “choices”. These instances of suicide and substance abuse are not contained; they permeate the fabric of our society in a way that only few can admit. Unfortunately, most who admit fault are those who have been personally impacted by these topics. I completely agree with your point of view, Mr. Kristof, and would like to emphasize the point that these people who suffer “deaths of despair” are living lives not unlike the people who scrutinize them. These young Americans are brought up and told how the “normal” way to live is for their community. Just like how some of us are told college is the step after high school, young people in target areas are presented with role models who demonstrate a life that begins and ends with harmful substances. It is not a choice they are presented with, it’s an expectation. By beginning to fix this, we need to strengthen the educational system in order to provide new role models for young Americans. Hopefully in the future substance abuse and suicide will not be such a taboo subject and will be seen as a real issue that needs to be tackled head on and discussed with tact for those who know no other way to live.
What strikes me is that the one who went to prison, survived. When, on the Twelfth Day of Christmas (Epiphany), I asked the women in our county jail what epiphany was most powerful in their lives, the majority said being imprisoned. Most of them have substance abuse problems. What wild irony, that when we incapacitate people in prison (for me, the only real justification for locking human beings up), they can realize that being forced to be clean/sober, can be a gift.
Your analysis is wonderful, Mr. Kristoff, but there are sometimes truly good unintended consequences. The Quakers invented penitentiaries for enforced reflection. Try jail/prison work, folks, as it might help set you free.
3
The irony of the US bent toward personal responsibility is that every other modern, industrialized nation in the world seems to recognize the need for social responsibility with effective results. Most other modern, industrialized nations have truly comprehensive, affordable healthcare and affordable college and vocational tuition. These policies have lead to longer life expectancies, lower poverty rates and strong GDPs, and lower incarceration rates than the US. I find it mind boggling at times that the US does not see the evidence and do the same. The truth is we are all interdependent, not just within our families, but within the world around us.
10
“Misfortune comes from a combination of bad luck and bad judgement”. I am quoting Jon Krakauer, who used this expression in his book about the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, Into Thin Air.
The Knapp children caused their own deaths. Yes, they had bad luck and (it seems) a hostile environment, but they also had the power to act differently. We should listen to their story and ask ourselves if there is anything we could have done differently, be it in their lives or ours. We are not responsible for their judgement, however, just as they and Mr. Kristof are not responsible for ours.
1
This is a great essay and I'll take it one step further: why is the narrative of personal responsibility only applied to people at the bottom of the economic scale? Why are "winners" held less accountable for their transgressions and addictions than the poor? Why is cheating the system an anathema when we talk about food stamps but not when it comes to multi-national companies paying zero federal taxes?
From a policy perspective, our collective scorn is always punishing the have nots when it should be directed at those rigging the system for their own benefit.
16
Thank you Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn for writing about this in such a personal way. It seems most of us have experienced the terrible and heart-wrenching devastation that results from a friend or family member who suffers the consequences of addiction. I hurt for them - daily. Our collective lives matter, now more than ever. If we can elect people to govern who have even a basic understanding of the Social Contract, then we might start to solve some of our society’s ills. Yamhill, Oregon is US! So many of it’s families are fractured, desperate, downtrodden, unlucky. How can we turn away from our fellow beings, and still call this nation great or even good?
2
I feel like my story is the next phase of our tightrope society. I am 60 and was recently laid off. I’ve been told I have an amazing resume and I have an Ivy League MA but 30 years ago I married the wrong man and we moved to an exburb that felt like a good place to raise a family. Our kids were diagnosed with dyslexia, so my career remained on the back burner. When the marriage imploded, I ended up commuting nearly three hours a day to make a reasonable salary and my ex chose to play a very minimal role in our kids lives. The city’s mismanagement of infrastructure flooded my home repeatedly but they could not be held accountable so I lost $50K in equity while the cost of an average house soared to over $400K. State college tuition runs $15k and rent in our college communities is exorbitant (lots of wealthy out of state students), so my kids have $30-40k in loans. I was lucky enough to find a professional telecommute position for the past 4 years, but it’s over. I can’t face the prospect of three hour commutes again, so I’m focusing my work search on cheaper parts of the country. The move will cost between $30 and 40K (realtor fees and move) but I may be able to find a small house I can pay off before I’m 70. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to absorb all these things, but I’m tired and there’s no comfort or security in sight. Despair is creeping and mistakes like a bad marriage or living in the wrong place derail middle class lives every day too.
22
Good luck in your move. Your story is not about addiction but a slow and insidious pile of challenges you did not deserve but have endured. You are a profile in everyday courage and I honor you.
We all killed the Knapp family in your home town, Mr. Kristoff. We also killed several other families right here in NYC, in my hometown, albeit we tried to be attentive, to change things, but were powerless, or perhaps didn't try hard enough to save.
It was not a matter of their choices, it was circumstances that could have been changed by town or city administrators, by institutions that could have provided better programs, by asking school officials to add better curriculums, by making doctors accountable because they knew that prescribing particular medications to some would become deadly. But the doctors are too busy with their patient load, or maybe these patients went to clinics and were prescribed in a willy-nilly manor and got what they wanted or needed.
Politicians are too busy or simply do not care until it is too late, and then they make a big show of the epidemic in their town, an epidemic we are fully aware of and terrified of because it could affect anyone of us.
Then again, personally, we are just as culpable. We do not want to spend time with these wastes of humanity. Do we? A kind word would never dent their situation. Would it? It is about time that we try to remedy the situation before it is too late and our list of the most valuable friends that we have, those that are probably the most loyal of all in our lives, are lost to us forever. It could start with a kind word and a helping hand.
2
Don't blame society for this terrible poverty. Blame the oligarchs who actually run America with the help of their obliging servants in government. How many more studies do we need to show that everyday folks have little to no say in policy? The nation's awful disparity in income and wealth isn't our choice and isn't our fault. Check out reality before you assign blame.
4
The "personal responsibility" ethos also emanates from the rise of Milton Friedman economics, and the cult of Ayn Rand adherents over the past 40 years -- both synthesized in the person and politics of Paul Ryan, for example. It was always beyond me how he could be a practicing Catholic and an Ayn Randian. This is what neoliberalism looks like!
4
Having worked for over 40 years as a clinical social worker (LCSW), doing outreach into the community and seeing clients in the office as a therapist, I have the opinion that not enough funding goes into social services, due to the "bootstrap" attitude. Also, people who are preoccupied with physical and mental disabilities don't tend to advocate in a group or vote. This "blame the victim" attitude tends to be internalized by the client and leads to a downward spiral of dysfunction and avoidant behavior.
We need funding for community outreach and for mental health services. The solution for this is to increase incentives for workers to go into those fields, through training and education and increased salaries. In addition, we need a concerted effort to educate the populace about how the improvement in these services would benefit all. Lastly, we need representation in state and federal government that responds to those needs.
4
Anyone who is a mother can identify with the look on the mother's face in your column - the despair and sadness she must feel regarding her lost children is unimaginable to me.
Anyone who has struggled - and as one of three children raised from a young age by a single mom in NYC, I have - can understand their situation and more importantly consider: "there but for the grace of God, go I.
Anyone who has raised children knows how difficult it is - in this day and age - to keep them on the right track.
And anyone with emotional pain knows the power of a substance that can help you feel good.
I am lucky - I didn't have a mother who would have enabled any "slacking" and what it taught me was this: others are less fortunate but that doesn't mean they don't deserve grace, love and the acceptance of social and moral responsibility by the rest of us.
Again - thank you Mr. Kristof for writing about what cannot and should not be ignored.
6
Mr Kristoff's article and the Sunday Review article by Michelle Alexander reminded me of an incident in my life having to do with individual responsibility.
I had four sons playing little league at the time, so I had to rotate from game to game to see each one. Always keeping the most talented until last.
Luckily I was in the stands when he was rounding third and about to score the winning run.
He slid high, and knocked the catcher out at the plate and scored the winning run.
The umpire ruled the catcher blocked the plate illegally, and so the run counted.
The next day I went to the Little league headquarters and demanded he be suspended.
They said that they could not because the umpire ruled the play legal.
I said fine, but I was taking him out for the rest of the year.
My son said I was the only one in the village against him.
I said fine, but I am the only one who is your father.
It seems to me that articles that make excuses for those who do wrong play right into the hands of the rednecks.
The most important thing we can teach our children is individual responsibility. Even if that means we are made the bad guy for a while.
Without individual responsibility we have chaos.
4
Mr. Kristof, our challenge is this:
Most conservative Americans, from blue collar laborers to white collar executives, are good people who work hard and play by the rules.
But if there's one thing that unites them in suspicion and judgemental hostility (seen in many comments on your and Ms. WuDunn's earlier piece "Who Killed the Knapp Family?") it's the thought that they're paying for something-for-nothing giveaways (e.g., social welfare programs, Medicaid) and that the recipients are people of weak moral character who -- adding insult to injury -- laugh at tax-paying Americans while receiving benefits.
Yes, the above sentiments boost terrible, sometimes racist, stereotypes. But if we socially-conscious liberals want to do more than pay lip service to respecting peoples' feelings, if we want to bridge today's chasming cultural divide, we need to start with those feelings -- no matter how frustrated we get with them.
The best way to start is by confronting such fears and staunching declaring that social program fraud will be detected and rooted out.
Then we must clearly explain (and keep explaining and publicizing) how these programs hugely benefit we-the-taxpayers -- as you did with the stat that every dollar invested in treatment programs can save us a whopping $12 in criminal justice and health care costs.
The reality is, appeals to compassion alone won't win the support and votes needed for real change.
4
Nick, I've lived in France for 45+ years, during which time unemployment here has risen, too. It's much higher than in the US right now, for example.
Yet over that time, I've also observed a far greater awareness among regular working people of history and political issues than in the US.
I read recently about the US president calling his military team dopes and babies when they try to lure him into looking at a map and discussing why the country has allies. And thought of all French kids studying the history of working class movements and, say, the rise of fascism.
My impression is that this "big picture" has made unemployment in particular less "shameful" in France. You are not just an individual struggling with adversity; you are part of a greater whole where historical trends are in play.
Not that hard times don't trigger despair here, too. But awareness of general social responsibility and structural reactions over many years have led to a stronger social safety net and universal healthcare, which help temper the blow.
Those public services come at a cost, naturally. Which may be one reason why young (and healthy) French entrepreneurs often find the free-wheeling USA a more energizing (and less expensive) place to launch their businesses. Lots of quotes in the press about that.
But quality of life hinges on not leaving people behind -- or alone -- to deal with whatever life holds. How strange that the far more "religious" US is such a laggard on social solidarity.
10
We all have free will.
The drug doesn't make you take it. The food doesn't make you eat it.
Addiction is a choice, a decision not to deal, to avoid or delay, to feel...there are a lot of starters.
Before you become too outraged, consider the possibility that I might know what I’m talking about.
2
@Raz ,
And this is why Mr. Kristof wrote this piece. Wow, if ever there was a statement more reflective of the lack of empathy now blowing a chill where our nation's heart once radiated warmth and promise. Did you ever consider you don't know each individual's circumstances? That there are lots of examples where you are wrong? Choices of course do matter. So does understanding, sympathy, forgiveness, and enlightened self-interest. The attitude reflected in your statement is precisely what is wrong in our society. I pray you, and other's like you, soften your hearts, and are able to receive the love you so clearly don't feel.
7
@Raz
I can pretty much tell you that nobody makes a decision to become an addict. Many become addicted to drugs that have been prescribed for them, while others become hooked because of a lack of readily available counseling for mental health issues. Alcohol, legal and ubiquitous, is the most commonly used drug.
I see this up surge in addiction and addiction related deaths as being the other side of the coin that is the dissatisfaction that has driven many to the extremes of racial, ethnic and class hatred that we experience today; i.e. loss of economic opportunity, the changing face of who is an American today, changing cultural norms, etc.
Some have dealt with it by becoming involved in extreme politics while others have found solace in their drug of choice.
Neither is a solution nor do they bode well for society at large.
2
@Raz You make the author's point about a deep deficit of compassion fueled by a false "personal responsibility" ideology.
5
Where does the role of education and parents instilling a love of learning and responsibility in their children come in to this ?
4
@Peggy Highly educated people become addicts, too.
There was another recent NYT article, an opinion piece I think, by a Villanova professor who points about an important and too often overlooked side of this. American capitalism has, at least since the mid-19th century, been in the business of creating and exploiting addictions of all types. Personal responsibility: part of the problem. Lack of best practices for understanding and treating addictions on a societal level: part of the problem. Willful exploitation of the process of addiction on an obscene, national scale over, and over, and over: a big part of the problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/opinion/prohibition-anniversary-100.html
3
Here is the help I wish someone would organize & offer:
Make it easy for people to move to where job opportunities await. This wouldn't solve the whole problem, but it would sure improve a big chunk of it.
As an example, consider what I faced when I moved to a mid-size city in the Pacific northwest. I found a rental apartment, a bit shabby, but nice, which went for $900 month plus a monthly $25 surcharge for a pet. (Perhaps there were cheaper ones, but I failed to find them.)
What did it take to move in to this apt?
First and last months' rent: $1800
Pet surcharge: $25 monthly
Pet damage deposit: $250
tenant background check: $40
Then 30 days later, another $925, monthly thereafter.
So: I needed $2115 cash on hand to move in, then $925 within 30 days.
Luckily I had been able to regain my security deposit from my previous apt. But many, many would-be renters either have to wait 30 days to regain their own money, or it's withheld forever, for reasons righteous or illegal.
Yet we live in a country where a very large portion of our populace can't lay their hands on $400 for an emergency such as illness or car breakdown.
So . . . why don't people move to where opportunities are better?
They can't possibly afford to!
We need subsidized, family-size dorms in cities that need workers. Come & stay for free for 3-6 months, while you find a job.
That would solve one very big problem in this mess.
And you'd see less people living in tents, as they do in my city.
24
There are many members of wealthier families, and wealthier communities, that make equal and worse mistakes than the Knapps. I could name a fairly good number within my own family. The difference in their lives I can directly attribute to the safety net of money and privilege that protected them from their own mistakes. Most of them have not become as successful or wealthy as their peers or progenitors, but they had enough support to stay alive and survive without the same type of consequences suffered in poorer communities.
21
With all due respect, buying a kid a (presumably brand new) Mustang for his sixteenth birthday when he dropped out of school at age fourteen, is not exactly responsible parenting. Mind you, by your own description, the economy was doing well for the Knapp family at this point. The comments you highlight are deplorable and I do not share them, but you place to much emphasis on structure and not enough on agency. How many of these people continue to vote against their own best interests out of pique for insults, imagined or real?
3
Beautiful column. We live in an era of cynicism and despair, as we watch our institutions crumble around us. Some of us are up for the fight, but for so many, it is too much to bear. If we are honest, it is not hard to see why.
We live in a society of inherited wealth and social capital that is handed down. Look at the generation of political families; the young, inexperienced people that land good jobs easily because of their “connections”; the folks that know the secret handshake because they frequent the same country club. It’s not hard to see that the notion of equal access is the biggest myth of all, one that blinds us to collective responsibility and the fairness that we Americans pride ourselves on. What exists is a continuum of privilege, or lack thereof.
Until we are led in our government by people who embody personal responsibility; until we buy our products from CEOs who don’t descend from wealthy families; until we all are given an ear by those with wealth and in power, anyone who condemns another for not taking “personal responsibility” is falling victim to the American myth—at our peril. The notion of the self made man is tempting, but pernicious, for as John Donne said, “No man is an island.”
8
I was working in a hospital as a nurse-midwife in a downtrodden former industrial city in PA in 2007 and 2008. During that time, we saw a lot of young white pregnant women come in addicted to heroin. There wasn't as much awareness of the opioid crisis back then. I'll admit, I come from a fairly privileged background, and it never occurred to me to wonder why these women were addicted to drugs. I thought it was just something that happened... but I will never forget a nurse I worked with. She told me that every time a girl came in addicted to heroin she asked her why. And she had realized that most of these girls got started when a doctor prescribed opioids after a car accident, or other injury. Just by asking, she had started to understand a phenomenon that we as a society wouldn't recognize until much later. The difference between her and me? She came from the same background as these girls, and she didn't see them as drug addicts, she saw them as people like her. And so it made no sense to her that they were drug addicts. There had to be a "why." I'm happy to say that she now has a Ph.D and is an addiction treatment specialist. But I never forgot her lesson of simple curiosity. When you see a person as different from you, you can also see their problems as inevitable. When you understand that they are no different from you, then you know there must be a "why."
24
personal responsibility ( which for newborns obviously lies with the parents) and opportunity are not dichotomous.
1
I too grew up in Oregon. It came as a surprise to me when I left the state in the mid-seventies and moved to Washington, D.C. The progressive traditions of a solid and comprehensive public education; free and open access to beaches and public lands; and the positive sense of community (Keep Oregon Green), that I had experienced growing up did not exist on the east coast. My family, like the Knapps, experienced many of the same ills---addiction, alcoholism, incarceration---that continue to effect me today. Yet my early exposure to a shared ethic of social and environmental good, has provided me with guideposts throughout my life. The difference in my family between those who have survived and those who did not has not been due to class, personal strength, "morality," or some other abstract characteristic. The difference can be best attributed to our inability to find a way to truly empathize with each other. Certainly each of us in the family have made choices, but at the same time we are driven by strengths and weaknesses that can drive us beyond the immediate limits of our control. This is where family-school-community can and must step in to provide assistance. The tragedy of the Knapps and my family and many families in the U.S. today when we lose a loved one to disease, is not that we lack the skills to communicate with them and perhaps provide a means for recovery. No, the tragedy is that we have those skills and those resources, but fail to use them.
5
Thank you for writing this column (and the one before). As Bryan Stevenson says in "Just Mercy:" The opposite of poverty is not wealth. In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice."
7
The University of Oregon is constructing a new stadium for one sport, track, at a cost of $195 million dollars! “We need a facility that will be built for the future,” University of Oregon president Michael Schill said. “And that’s what this is.” In fact, it’s nothing more than a vanity project for Phil Knight and Nike. This lavish over the top grotesquery makes the new NYC Hudson Yards look cheap. Stuck in the middle of a public school campus, in a working class town, in a working class state, the stadium is an homage to misguided social values; like driving a Mercedes to a food bank. As a former public school teacher and now prison counselor, my question is “What kind of a future is being built by decades of underfunded public schools K-12, health care, infrastructure, and the environment?” This article describes the result. How can anyone maintain faith in the “system” when global conglomerates have a $195 million dollars to foist on a field for kids to run and jump.
19
I'm sure others have pointed out that blame, hate, and social irresponsibility are equal opportunity employers. This is the narrative that brought us Welfare Queens, and blamed the black community for its difficulty in confronting what amounts to institutionalized racism in this country, with its concomitant drive to lock up people of color and deny opportunities readily accessible to people of means.
The right in this country has done its very best to divide people--workers, low-income people of color, the trans and LBTQ population from each other (identity politics is a White Supremacist dream come true.)
People like the Knapps are Americans who need the help of the community: just like everyone of us needs our community at every point in our lives. It's how a civilized nation works.
And our claim to that title is is now precarious.
7
Such an important message. Thanks for writing it so well.
3
Thank-you for your follow-up. Throwing stones from high atop the privileged access that some are lucky to have, due often only to parents with money, resources, and a connected life is an ignorant and cruel reaction. I suspect that many of those would not be doing so well if they did not have those advantages. But they attribute their luck and support to their genius. It is always hard to walk a mile in others’ shoes, but if one can’t even imagine the difficulty, there is a true lack of understanding.
Case in counterpoint...our President was born into massive wealth, and yet look at all the business failures. Imagine if he had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks. The bootstrap myth is just that, a myth.
7
I wish you had discussed by you, growing up in the same zip code, riding that same bus, were successful and the Knapps weren't.
5
Increasing indifference to, and decreasing concern for those around us, has continued for several generations in the U.S. Simultaneously, we have, worshiping the gods of hedonism and materialism, used technological advances to transform a large part of the essential middle class, and their skills, into nonessential, low skill, expendable workers. America has never asked, or addressed, the question underlyiing this revolution: What is (or who is) an economy for? How do we implement technological advances, so that they sustain the well-being of "average" people? Sigmund Freud, and Andean laborers, both used the coca plant, but it did not take over their lives. Drugs devastate individuals, and communities, where people are expendable. Competition (dominance/submission) and cooperation (consensus/cooperation) are both organizing systems
wired into our social brains. We decide how we will live together, and in so doing, we decide the fate of the people we live with, including those described in Mr Kristof's
hometown.
4
Agreed. Loneliness, existential angst and despair is often remedied with substance. I find, the more alone in the world one feels, the more one needs escape.
The society more and more is built to benefit the upper levels of society. With degradation of the environment, and people’s connection with it, worldwide, people are more disillusioned - have no center - except the next one they can possibly buy.
The spirituality that is offered in this system is also packaged and is not directly connected to protecting the forces and systems of nature that keep us alive. It is no wonder people- and many in the world are in despair- some have the money to keep lying to themselves that they have what the universe wants them to and they earned it- and some are so busy just trying to scrape by in this strange industrial world- that the absolute essentials of life are threatened both by how we live and the system that governs us.
This economic system is ultimately not working for anyone and anything long term. We have to end this type of “growth” economy that eats people and ecosystems.
4
@Lulu Well said, I agree completely about your point - in different words - that the rise of what I call "techno-feudalism", is more than we care to admit, inseparable, from our "conquering of nature"-and is, in effect, burning down our own home,
with us inside. Unfortunately, I fear that it will require a huge tragedy to frighten enough people to consider the possibility that the "growth" economy is better understood as humans having way outgrown our ecological niche. We have become an invasive species. I still work, and hope, that we can ease back, sliding, bumping, tumbling down a slope, rather than falling off a cliff, to reach a sustainable home.
2
It depends on who "our" is. If you mean us as a society, I disagree. We didn't take away their jobs, business did. How they responded was their doing. We didn't get them hooked on drugs - a situation that requires 100% of their participation to get there in the first place. Their fault, not ours. We didn't shape their limited perception of reality by prohibiting them from getting an education and leaving that place when they realized their finances were evaporating and family crumbling. Their fault, not ours. I am sick of being called a perpetrator, committing injustice on those who do not care for themselves. They had resources, they had opportunities. They even had numerous immediate examples of how not to live. Their fault, not ours.
3
Now that the white working class finds their employment opportunities dwindling, they are succumbing to exactly the same societal ills that have plagued others for generations. It's curious how this phenomenon is now expected to attract sympathy rather than the scorn and dismissal that these same circumstances garnered by minority populations.
Will we finally address these failings in our capitalist system now that white people have been affected? Or will we continue to have two sets of excuses and blame depending on the color of the "offenders/victims" skin.
5
This should be required reading - with a follow-up discussion - for every Republican politician, if not for everybody. Thank you for offering a sane and thought-through rebuttal to the rabbit hole of insanity the trumpsters (mainly, but others, too, often less malign but still wrong-headed) are forcing us through.
2
"…harsh social narrative that vilified those left behind…"
Myopic, judgemental vilification is a feature of the Conservative worldview. They manifest an inability to empathize with the struggles of others unless they, or someone they personally know, has directly experienced the same struggle. Conservatives also manifest the endless ability to take sole credit for their "successes" while rationalizing and excusing their own "failings".
5
Thank you for saying this so eloquently. This attitude of "They brought it on themselves" would seem to apply to anyone who isn't fortunate enough to be healthy and have money in the bank. The denial of real life consequences of a class society such as ours are echoed everywhere, including many of the op-eds in this newspaper. If it all comes down to individual character, then so many poor people just lack character. The smugness inherent in these comments is what defines the Ugly American.
2
We are here on this earth to take care of each other. That is our purpose. It's not just working class people like the Knapps; when people die of starvation in famines, or drown in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe, or kill themselves when they can't pay back loans, it is absolutely our responsibility. When they die, it is because we did not help them.
4
Personal responsiblity? Only people terrified of responsibility would argue that all suffering people had it coming.
2
I fundamentally agree with your policy prescriptions. There is no doubt that our society needs to be more supportive and improve our social safety net. I am also very sad for the friends you lost. But kristof’s moralizing is tiresome. It is highlighted by the remarkable and obvious errors in your reasoning. Saying newborns and children can’t have deficiencies in character based on statistics that reflect their predicted aggregate risk - calculated from their ADULT neighbors and family - is a cheap parlor trick. Developing the right policy is not about moral posturing - it’s about figuring out what works. You’d rather just advertise your purity of intention. No wonder conservatives turn off when some liberals start speaking. It feels the same as a lecture from a hypocritical religious moralizer. This is about working out your own guilt. It has nothing to do with solving bedeviling social puzzles.
2
Let us split the blame between us and them.I had pain killers prescribed many times and did not become an addict.This is not due to will power or moral standing they simply did not do anything for me to want to take them beyond the time that I was supposed to take them.People's brain works differently.Difficult life might want people to escape their reality.These are the people of HRC's deplorables .The answer is not more welfare but probably less.The Trump economy helps along with border security decreasing competition for low wage jobs.v
2
The truth is we all make mistakes. Caught in a web of despair, we all will make more “mistakes”.
The difference between the “haves” and the “have nots” is that people with resources and a bank account have a far better chance of coming back and recovering from those mistakes. Without those resources, recovery is extremely unlikely.
The legacy of the Calvinist mindset has left us a cruel country controlled by the most selfish of men — and they are, overwhelmingly, men.
Moving forward requires displacing a lot of powerful greedy people from positions of power. And, it requires recruiting a lot of their supporters, who may have nothing themselves, but have been convinced that every mouthful of food given to a child in poverty has been snatched from their own.
As the Buddha said, evil originates in ignorance.
4
I'm contrasting the social/governmental dystopia you vividly describe against a recent article, here in the New York Times, about a couple with a child that moved from the States to Finland, and found the social welfare net and job opportunities optimal for raising their child and furthering their not-so-lucrative-in-the-States careers.
The harsh social attitude you explore seems to me like some Wild, Wild West frontiersman attitude of, "Each man for himself out here!, There ain't even a Sheriff for miles, and if you don't have your six-shot Smith-and-Wesson (please upgrade that to an AR-15 with large magazine, for the purposes of inflation), you be dead meat, boy!"
And this is precisely what the Republican Party and the NRA exploit for political purposes. Give these Wild, Wild West men and women the cultural representation they can respect in a government, all while you literally rip the social-safety-net system out from under their feet. Why people don't see this is beyond me. Then again, you have to read a lot of depressing news over a very long period of time to put all the puzzle pieces together. Most folks don't have the patience for that.
4
I value Mr. Kristf's opinions, but on this subject I differ.
Many immigrants who immigrate to this country, work extremely hard, with no family support and financial means, and become successful contributors to this country.
I don't think the socciety and the government shoukld take responsibility for one's poor choices and actions especially for the privileged white people who definitely are born with more opportunities and superior racial justice.
Bottom line one creates one's own life!
2
Some Americans would seem to delight in punishment. Add an occasion for moral opprobrium, like drug use or the petty crimes of poverty, and the satisfactions are evidently boundless for the self-appointed moral scourges.
An entire political party is run on this pathology. As is much of our fundamentalist religion.
This is, alas, who we are.
2
People lack free will. We don't want to accept this. But if we did, it would end all judgment, and any punishment would become corrective and for the safety of others. Please study this topic and see for yourself. It will be the most liberating discovery you've ever made. Liberation from judgment, including of yourself.
1
You are absolutely correct in your analysis and your complaint about the failings of our government. How can you not be a supporter of Bernie Sanders?
The Winners are always looking for explanations for why they deserve their success (other than dumb luck or happenstance). Social Darwinism is just such a convenient pseudo-scientific explanation. In the old days, the hereditary elite had a certain feeling of noblesse oblige. The current “meritocracy” has no such compassion.
In criticizing others for their "bad choices" and "poor character" is speaker is suggesting, and trying to reassure him or herself, that he or she must have made good choices and has good good character. It's the old "he was born on third base but thinks he hit the homer" fallacy. To Mr. Jonathan and Mr Ajax, your comments reflect your poor character, not theirs.
1
Thank you for writing this and the other column. You always seem to find the right way to share the important concepts.
We are all connected. We are all the better when others are well. I certainly believe in natural selection but our species is showing all the signs of deselecting itself with chest thumping individualist triumphalism.
1
"Morality of grace"says it all. Thank you!
Why are so many people so arrogant about their successes? It's easy to win when the game of life is rigged in your favor. It's not that hard to pull yourself up when you're always assured of bootstraps. It's almost impossible when society works to make sure you can't get them.
1
"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed and well-fed." Herman Melville
4
I remember the first time I heard the "they mad their choice" defense. I was stunned as it came from a close friend.
Should we stop pursuing criminals like Bernie Madoff since his investors weren't smart enough to see they were being scammed? Should children dying of poor or malnutrition be allowed to die since they "chose' to have poor or uncaring parents? That "thinking" isn't just an insult to the victims who are being victimized again but it goes deeper. It's an insult to the concept of humanity and to all the ideals that we say we stand for. What makes up human is not who we blame. It's who we protect.
5
There is a joke about personal responsibility that was directed at G.W. Bush the first time I heard. It concerns the man who was born on third base and was sure he hit a triple.
2
@Pat
- - credit late but beloved Molly Ivins, a Texan herself and acute observer of political vanities, especially of the Texas variety.
3
It seems in the meantime between free-time and it hitting the fan, we have only our distractions, our attempts to create control in our lives. The issues we must face, the issues looming over us like guillotines in a row over our lives, are climate change (denied to be occurring), over-population (that is the problem, not immigration), war (coming to a country near you soon), and the legitimacy of governance (name a country - the leader is probably corrupt).
What are citizens to do in a time when the voice of citizens has been taken away? Power is never given, only taken. At that point, you are probably trading one problem for another. Our planet needs a different path, a different way to create the ability to face, and deal, with what are the singular issues of our time, and for any hope of a future for the 7th generation.
I say that facing any cognitive dissonance is the first responsibility that rank and file citizens must do. If you are religious, is the party or person you are aligned with religious, and living the life you aspire too? If you are poor, and struggling, does the the party or person you are aligned with show good works in alleviating your station in life? If you care about the state of the environment around you, does the party or person you are aligned with act in accordance? If you aspire to leave the world a better place than what is was when you were born, is the party or person you are aligned doing the things that will make that possible?
1
As a youngster I was proud we had a Constitution with the foundation of the Declaration of Independence declaring that it was the duty of government to protect inalienable rights of the people...not only freedom, but the pursuit of happiness. Growing up, I learned that that ideal was only realized by some and couldn't be taken for granted. Then, we regressed.
Part of the landscape of our country seems more an emulation of Scrooge and the Wall Street villain/s who became hero.
I don't know why blame and cruelty seem to have replaced what maybe was never there?
Blaming the victim says an encyclopedia's worth about the blamers...codifying it says everything about our growing lack of humanity. We are all diminished.
2
To be honest, when the first wave of pity for opioid addicts swept the nation I was annoyed. Was I expected to have empathy for rural white Trump voters when my poor black crack addicted New York neighbors endured decades of the War on Drugs along with unimaginably long jails terms for nonviolent crimes, ridicule rather than empathy, and the claim that addiction was a character flaw.
This article has spurred my empathy. Perhaps its time to end the ridiculous class warfare and accept that no one chooses to be an addict nor deserves the fallout of having their life, health, career and family destroyed. Can we accept that we, as a nation, are worse off when huge swaths of our territory are gripped by poverty, addiction and despair regardless of whose “fault” that is?
4
“In my judgment such of us who have never fallen victims have been spared more by the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have. Indeed, I believe if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class."
The words are those of Abraham Lincoln, over a century and a half ago.
You can read his full address here:
https://www.silkworth.net/pages/washingtonians/abraham_lincoln_on_alcoholism.php
Lincoln spoke out of wisdom uninformed by the discoveries of science regarding dependency and addiction. Our acquired knowledge has shown his wisdom to be anchored on facts.
Yet, we have too many among us who wallow in what can only be deliberate ignorance and false self-worship.
4
Very good article and well timed book. I wish you'd tie all of it into this: trauma, especially adverse childhood experiences. There is an established link that must be addressed if our societies deal with addiction, and move forward in sustainable ways.
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childabuseandneglect/acestudy/index.html
1
This is a human problem. Just the fact, people reply so arrogantly, nefariously and uncaring is to me at least, another example of our downfall as a nation. There are concrete reasons some persons have a better chance at survival than others. Why do we mourn the loss by suicide of a Stanford student but, not a working class person who loses their job? Why are we different? Why don't we help one another. Inequality of opportunity, of wealth and education do more harm to our nation than, most other predicaments. Ben Carson is a shameful person. He is where he is because, he turned his back on the greater good and because, he was an extremely talented neurosurgeon. Someone needs to make the instruments he uses. Someone needs to make the scrubs he wears, the nurses uniforms the lights, the cameras the beds. Why do their lives matter less than his? I expect a greater number of suicides due to unemployment, alcohol, drug abuse and sorrow in our future. What little manufacturing taking place in our country is replacing human beings with machinery. And, machines are building these machines. I wish more people cared. Most especially, I wish we had leadership who cared about the inequality rather than, celebrates and rewards the top tiers.
1
Anyone with a friend or relative who is being swept away in the maelstrom of addiction knows that preaching personal responsibility is like peeing on nuclear bomb. It relieves you but does nothing about the problem. People with addiction are impervious to lecture. They need treatment, then support to rebuild, and forgiveness. The first two are easy for us - they just require commitment and resources. The last can be very difficult.
2
Makes me ill that the Trump gang just eviscerated the regulations, inspired by Michelle Obama, that required school systems to provide nutritious lunches for low-income children. (Must be the kids’ fault that they don’t have a decent diet.) The reason? Too expensive. Meanwhile, Trump and his cronies continue to spend millions of our tax dollars at his luxury golf resorts. Oh, and just to twist the knife a bit, they did it on Michelle’s birthday. A coincidence, I’m sure...
5
I think its time we stop using the term; addictive personality.To describe those we know who become addicts. Nothing could be further from the truth. A physical dependence on a drug, is not a personality quirk. Our continued use of the term promulgates the idiotic belief that thee people are weak, or cowardly.
But we love the term, and abuse it, like addicts. When someone binges on a new thing (Nitro cold brew! Really people!?) its because they have an addictive personality. No!
I'm not an addicted exerciser, I'm a guy who needs it in my life to keep me mobile and strong (for work) and when sad to keep me from indulging in vices!
Saying we have an addictive personality is to self-diagnose, and in turn throw up our hands and give up on improving our self-awareness. Its also a way for those around us to describe us and in turn stop trying to help us, or better help us.
The addictive personality trap also makes it out to be fixable by not wanting to be it! By an act of will. Its also in line with how we tell depression sufferers to just stop being sad. "Honey, just stop being sad."
So much is wrong about how Americans view and what they believe to be the How and Why of addictions, and mental health in general. So much is wrong, its a safe bet to say that as a Culture we dont truly know squat!
We're long overdue for change. I hope Mr. Kristof, and others like him, can help. We need to be better educated in these areas - which affects us all.
2
Ours. All of us. For allowing the wealthy to treat us like prey.
Every person who was wrongly imprisoned in died in jail to feed the for profit incarceration and corporate run jail system
Every student that jumped off a bridge because of the hopelessness of hauling around massive student debt to feed the banking/higher education cartel.
Every homeowner who lost their home and killed themselves because of a life, a dream, ruined because of the WallStreet/banking ponzi scheme
Every American who died because they are denied access to afford health care
Every American who became hooked on opiate pills and as a result, heroin, to make the Sandler’s even more insanely wealthy.
We own it all. We let it happen. And we allowed all of these wealthy crooks to walk away. No justice served.
Those people are dead. And until justice is handed out against the wealthy who killed them, nothing will change.
And for that to happen. We have to change.
1
I was surprised to learn that life is unfair. This is a revelation for me.
5
Couldn't agree more. It's difficult to make good choices when the only choices you are are bad choices that lead nowhere.
1
Here in Ontario, Canada, our premier got elected in part because of his promises to make beer cheaper and allow alcohol sales in corner stores. Perhaps he took his cue from our prime minister who legalized the sale and use of marijuana.
Not that I don't enjoy the occasional beer, but some Canadians have problems with alcohol consumption, and this year is sure to see someone killed while driving stoned or some youngster taken to the E.R. to have his/her stomach pumped out after consuming edibles.
Too bad/so sad.
1
“...diminishing access to jobs.” Thanks to NAFTA and illegal immigration. But neither is an excuse for lack of personal responsibility and character.
1
I would not judge the Knapp family harshly. They are no different than countless other people who suffered the same fate due to conditions in post industrial America. The question is not whether they deserved their fates (they did not IMHO), rather what can be done to prevent such grim endings. Airbags vs. spikes in the dashboard. Good observation.
1
Excellent column, as usual. How I wish we had 100 others like you.
Mr. Kristof, I don't think you are going far enough when you (rightly) point out how the ugly comments by some of your readers reflect the ideological brokenness of American social policy.
While most won't admit it, I believe many of the "haves" are all too happy to watch the "have nots" slowly destroy themselves so that they have less competition for resources and don't have to be confronted with uncomfortable truths.
And it's that unreflecting individualism and incapacity for empathy that's the true cancer in American society.
4
Governing principles aimed at not spending any money when the passage of a Bill causes the Treasury to create from thin air and computer keystrokes that money, means that the power of the peoples government is denied to them.
Bravo Mr. Kristoff!
I saw you on PBS Newshour the other night and was moved by your interview. It's not only our, as in citizens, responsibility to help, it is the responsibility of our government to take care of its people. There are probably thousands of organizations and even more citizens who weekly, if not daily, are working with those who are less fortunate. But our government makes it very difficult to help, and now with roll backs in food stamps and other social programs, people are desperate..desperate for help, and desperate to help. I hope your book will inspire elected officials to look into how they can better govern and help its citizens and the environment.
There is only one class in a community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
~~Oscar Wilde
88
Our increasingly complex society is harder and harder to navigate. There will always be those who can never climb into the mainstream either due to inherent physical or personal challenges. They need an enormous amount of our support. There are also those who will figure it out under almost any circumstances due to their personal gifts. It seems to me that there is an increasingly large middle, who in the past could coast in the middle. That space is either no longer available to them or they need help finding it. That is the help and pathway we are no longer providing.
1
Someone said, "How can you pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don't have any boots."
The story of the Knapps is truly sad. After reading the original story I've thought about it a lot. What could have been done to save this family? They seemed to start out okay. There are so many more like them. I have questions but no answers.
Having been born in 1933 in the Great Depression I certainly experienced poverty, but the majority of our friends and neighbors were experiencing the same thing.
We need another Frances Perkins.
My own opinion is that we shouldn't have to rely on labor unions to demand decent wages, decent working conditions, and health insurance. Our own government and Dept. of Labor should be providing this.
96
Your article exudes empathy right up to your use of the term "human capital". I deplore this term. Capital is defined as "wealth in the form of money or other assets owned....". Subliminally or consciously, this term is the result of the persistent dehumanization of employees by owners/management/employers.
My grandmother worked in the Personnel Department. But my employer has a Human Resources Department, which makes me a resource like office supplies, or a car in the motor pool, or raw materials ordered for manufacturing. For a short while in the twentieth century, the working class was making human progress. At least the name on the door was "Personnel". Now we have regressed to being consumable objects again.
This is all a symptom of the much greater human problem of empathy deficit. As I see it, the long game is either develop some empathy, get out of your bubbles and help each other, both domestically and internationally; or get ready for the inevitable eventual revolution, terrorism, and anarchy.
As someone who grew up in Oregon, I find this story extra tragic because Yamhill is just 45 minutes by car from downtown Portland. People in New York make that kind of commute, or worse, daily.
Opportunity was there, but because we don't invest in education, transportation (There is a bus to Portland that takes 2 hours, according to google), and medical care for the poor that doesn't just involve handing out pills. And this is of course without the overt racial discrimination faced by communities of color, as Oregon is frankly one of the whitest places you will ever see.
The fact that middle class white people less than an hour from a major, prosperous urban center are succumbing en masse to the same maladies as people deep in the woods of West Virginia or way out in the plains shows just how deep the problem goes. If they can't make it, what hope is there for poor black and latinx families and for isolated, rural white (and to be fair, latinx and black ones which we often forget about).
We can do better.
100
I have rarely come across such powerful articles. Nicholas, what I appreciate you doing here is what your article’s critics don’t do - that is, don’t judge the knapp’s situation but rather ask the question ‘why is this happening?’. I feel we are in a society now where folks on left and right don’t ask this and where ideology trumps curiosity and understanding.
To those who demand personal responsibility, i would suggest not subsidizing or leaving any inheritance to your kids or spending much time in helping them learn, develop and make choices... luxuries that many poor people don’t have. To not be hypocritical, let their kids learn on their own and, if necessary, fail. I doubt they’d feel similarly about themselves as others.
4
I think people who dismiss the plight of others do so to avoid feeling compelled to do something about it--something that might inconvenience them, cost them money, or require them to reflect on their own decisions and luck. Most of us would much prefer to think of our own successes as earned, or at least deserved. Recognizing how much "dumb luck" and the kindness of others (including good public policies and government programs) have helped us get where we are is humbling. It also obligates us, in all fairness, to acknowledge the impact of those same factors on the lives of others. If we have the intestinal fortitude to do this, it becomes very hard to remain complacent about the suffering of so many in our society. Ignorance of injustice is bliss, so many will work hard to maintain their ignorance.
98
Nick, thank you! When I grew up (1950’s-1960’s), “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and “Do onto others as you want others to do onto you” were virtually daily mantras. How far downhill we have come! Today it is more “Love they neighbor if they look and pray like you...until you can push them down so you feel you are above them” and “Do onto others before they do onto you.” I was born white, middle class, and male...all privileges, not characteristics that somehow make me better or more right. Whatever your religious or spiritual practice, it is time we accept the responsibility that each of us carry not just for ourselves, but for those with whom we inhabit this earth as well.
79
My family is riddled with mentally ill and alcoholic individuals. The fact that some of us escaped isn't because we're better or stronger or smarter people. It was the genetic lottery at work.
93
This is indeed a timely essay for what is now happening in my community. Our home is in a beautiful area of east Santa Rosa, as Jack London wrote, in "The Valley of the Moon." Yes, it is idyllic, but we have a growing problem...homelessness, to the point of it becoming an emergency. Our homeless are often mentally ill and drug and/or alcohol addicted. They live along our city-wide creek, some under a few small bridges, some with only trees for shelter. Filth and rats abound. Our St. Vincent de Paul Society just received approval to set up temporary housing for 60 (out of hundreds) and to provide proper services on county property across from our area. Uproar and outrage was and remains the reaction. At first I was among the many who said, "No way." I was afraid. But then I remembered Nicholas's piece on the Knapp family. And...my brother, now an agnostic but Jesuit high school and college educated, said two words to me, "Social justice." It is so easy for us, especially "progressive" Democrats, to "talk the talk." But it is harder for us to look in the mirror and proverbially "walk the walk." I'm trying.
148
As always, beautifully and thoughtfully said. I could not agree more. The spiked dashboard analogy reflects the societal attitudes and policies of our times. It is abhorrent that zipcodes often dictate the path of a child. The lack of collective social responsibility has played an outsized role in the diminished funding for public schools, in the lack of affordable childcare, in the failure to guarantee universal healthcare, in the failure to accept global warming and take steps to take care of the environment. We rise by lifting up others. Kindness is not weakness. It is strength. Thank you Mr Kristof and Ms WuDunn.
1
It's easy to criticize others, and far too many Americans have no sympathy for anyone else until the thing for which they have no sympathy happens to them. Sarah and James Brady, for example, didn't care at all about gun control until James got shot. I wonder how many of the Knapp family dismissed the inner-city cocaine epidemic as a collective character defect of the inner-city black community. Maybe none of the Knapps, but plenty of white people did, and smugly as that.
I'm a recovering alcoholic of 36 years' sobriety, and I'll never forget what it took for me to get sober: lots of AA, but also three weeks as an inpatient in the alcohol rehabilitation ward of a local hospital. My health insurance paid for almost all of it, and because I had the insurance through my job, I have been allowed to get well and have a life.
Right now we're a predator society that is destroying itself. If we are ever to deliver on the promise of our Constitution for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", we must replace our mania for competition with compassion for all of us.
119
My opinion is that the worst thing that has ever happened to business in this country is the proliferation of MBAs, particularly the Ivy League variety, and their espousal of shareholder value at the sacrifice of ever other good. That’s what has led to the ridiculous overcompensation of corporate honchos, the computerization of work schedules that makes many working parents’ hours completely inhumane and impossible to plan, etc.
111
@Luann Nelson I totally agree with this. Business in general has forsaken the societal contract. I'll further say that the minute we started referring to employees as "resources", those resources became faceless widgets who could be discarded at will. That most companies have done away with pensions speaks volumes about the lack of care for the people who allow corporate titans to reap their rewards. And it's only going to get worse with the advent of AI and other automation.
29
After an episode of “The Good Place” I took out Judith Shklar’s book “Ordinary Vices” where she says that the worst vice a society can have is cruelty. To insist that people be responsible does not mean that you have to be cruel to them. However, cruel societies can endure and this book explained why they do. It also explains a lot of what is happening today, especially what we witness at trump rallies and his policies.
4
No 100 percent blame or solutions. But, maybe, there are too few opportunities for people to be discretely helped away from their addictions: instead, we force people to confront their addiction demons. I think that there are too few opportunities for people to find a place for themselves, find happiness, success and even a sense of independence while also feeling like part of the pack. We've excluded people in very isolating ways, and then we demand that the focus on self discipline and study when perhaps people need to become a but less self-focused. All of the addicts I've known have suffered grave loneliness, bitterness, sadness, even self-pity / selfishness.
1
The narrative "everybody deserves what happens to them" is a social painkiller, and as opium based ones- makes society to depend on it. Neither should be distributed in our school system.
Western civilization, seems to be at loss with designing principles by which we can tackle those epidemics of misery. In the sixties and seventies we had instituted government programs that grew out of social ideas of twenties, supporting workers and their families. As the value of work seems to be harder to protect in the age of robots, it may be not enough to protect the "working families". Look at native Indians! It turns out (in Canada) that tax money and shelters are not enough either. Perhaps we have to turn those people to artists. Neither church nor government can teach us how. But the first principle should be- Do not do harm. That calls on legal and criminal system.
1
I'm a 62 year old white woman who had the opportunity to go into not just 1 but 3 drug treatment programs, the final 1 being a 2 year live in program. I've been clean for 30+ years but am reminded all the time how fortunate I am to be alive. If my father hadn't had the $ to pay for my treatment I'd be dead - no doubt about it! People die because they don't have access to adequate treatment - whether it be for drugs, depression or mental illness. It's heartbreaking!
8
The quote from Ben Carlson is pricelessly ironic, isn't it?
On one level, you could make the point that few people actually choose to live in dilapidated housing. Or live in neighborhoods where it's not even safe to drink the water (think Flint). Or send their kids to underfunded public schools.
And on another level, it's quite easy for people who are privileged and have the choices that come with it to make thoughtless statements about those don't.
5
This resonates with a lot of readers, including me, who have seen this in our old hometowns.
That title bother's me - perhaps it supposed to. There's nothing I have found in my life that seems as useless as blame - as the tendency to assign fault on someone, somewhere, even ourselves. It acts to constrict our thinking about problems, when we most need to be open to new ideas. I makes us liable to ignore the issues which make us uncomfortable, and cherry pick evidence.
No fault problem solving: we need it, along with some agreements about the essential human needs that a government should support in its policies and actions.
3
Like Catholicism, of which it is an interesting counterpoint, Calvinism came to this country in a variety of flavors. Some were deeply communitarian and inculcated a culture that joined other-accusation at least to self-accusation, and an understanding that the two were tightly tethered. Other flavors had less of that.And they all devolved and got rearranged in the mosaic of our civic belief systems. Currently, our nation's belief system includes strong elements of pull-youself-up-by-your-boostrapsism and the so-called Prosperity Gospel (and its New Age kitih and kin like The Secret/The Law of Attraction, est, et cet.) that is in fact and in orthodox Christian tradition neither Good News nor Christian - but both work together like the poles of a batter to power the decadence of late capitalism.
4
Yes, exactly. I have seen this amongst friends and others - myself trying to determine if I didn’t somehow wish this ill will upon myself. yogis, artists and all kinds who see the world as black and white - those who try and are not spiritually committed enough to their own salvation - or those who are somehow granted the income and many things they so desired.
1
Mr. Kristof: Again - another excellent article. So very sad about the Knapp family. " There but for the Grace of God, go I." That thought always comes to me when I hear or read about something like this. The reason that Congress and President Trump, especially President Trump, does nothing for low income children, is that he's never wanted for anything (financially, that is). He can't understand rising above poverty - in Ben Carson's case, he's forgotten, obviously. Their arrogance is appalling to me. America is better than what we have become. We need to vote our conscience in 2020 and may the Lord show us what that is.
3
If he thought it could pass Congress, Trump
would enact sweeping school choice legislation with vouchers and charter schools funded by the government. I can’t think of a better more powerful kind of support for low income children - particularly children of color.
1
Mr. Kristof, I respect your intelligence, rationality and compassion more than any other columnist. And I certainly respect and agree with many of your views in this column.
But you ignore one basic but hugely influential aspect relating to how one's life turns out - parenting.
I am in no way disparaging the parents of anyone in your story, as I obviously know little about them or how they raised their kids. But personal responsibility -- especially of parents to raise their kids with love and the teaching of good values -- is the single most important influence on a person's life, in my opinion. (It doesn't take a genius to come up with that.)
And what may lead to some of the harsh backlash to your story, though cruel and lacking in compassion, is that many of us are tired of so many ignoring personal responsibility.
I blame, in large part, the woke generation and their enablers, including the media for this. What's happened to the idea of basic personal responsibility. We must return to discussing its importance, then we can bring society's influence and responsibility into the mix.
4
@Rich The best parenting in the world is useless against mental illness or addiction. Especially in a country where affordable treatment and therapy is almost non-existent.
A medical professional once commented to me that most people fail to realize that means that parenting is always a 2 way street- it's not just how you parent it's how the child interprets it. Teaching good values does not require a child to live by them.
3
@Connie Martin I get that, of course. But USELESS against mental illness or addiction? I do not agree.
This accurately describes what has happened in the area around the rural midwest town I grew up in and in the area I live in now in the rural west where meth is destroying many lives and opioids are just starting to show up. I don't have much how that the rich who own this country will care enough to support programs that will change the trajectory of the situation.
4
The fate of the Knapps was not to be avoided by are simple preventative measures like a vaccine against a pathogen or not smoking cigarettes to reduce the risks of lung ailments or rescuing someone from drowning. It’s very complex and all efforts may not be sufficient.
Saving people like the Knapps by assuring all of a good chance to prosper by government programs and higher taxes in the context of the conservative Republican contempt for altruism and shared reduction of risks just makes giving a helping hand to our fellow humans very problematic.
1
Another factor to consider that supports your point of view is the prevalence of unhealthy workplace cultures today and how they adds stress to the lives of those who have less power, control, influence and status in organizations.
With all of the stressors facing families like the Knapps, it's likely they are in a chronic state of stress response, which means their brains (hippoocampus, in particular), digestive system and immune systems are not getting the blood, glucose and oxygen required for good health because those resources are being over-allocated to the body's fight or flight systems i.e. the heart, lungs and big muscles. In chronic stress response, people don't feel well and this leads them to self-medicate with substances and/or behaviors that are addictive.
Reducing stressors through the type of support you describe is essential. Equally important is boosting supportive social connections. Social connection makes us smarter, happier and more productive, calms our nervous system and helps damage complex trauma does to the brain. In contrast, loneliness is a super-stressor that makes stress more painful, reduces sleep quality and diminishes self-control required to eat healthy and exercise. It's a complex mix but hopefully the description I provided will give you an addition path to explore.
6
True compassion requires sacrifice from those who seek a clear conscience. Blaming requires no effort at all to obtain a clear conscience plus a strong sense of superiority.
2
You didn't tell us what external forces pushed the Knapp children to despair, but assume it was a lack of opportunity. But even so, a family of five where the success story is the sibling who spent 13 years in jail has to reflect individual bad choices (starting with the parents, including their decision to have five children) as well as external forces. Are we to believe that employment opportunity adequate to support an adequate lifestyle would have changed everything? I don't.
I'm not suggesting that our society hasn't made bad choices too. Our effort to deal with drugs through the criminal justice system works about as well as our experiment with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages and deserves the same end. And we need programs that create opportunities for people who are willing to pursue them. But we have to recognize that there will still be failures -- even a Kristoff-style compassionate approach to addiction won't always work and that some people will die from drug and alcohol use.
4
The author ironically uses revealing rhetoric, like "human capital", "compete" and "investments" - these terms reflect an underlying ideology best described as "Neoliberalism".
Sadly, despite rejecting the harsh "personal responsibility" meme of so many of the commenters on the original piece, he still fails to understand the roots of his own ideology and how the "personal" is directly linked to the economic model of capitalism that has created the underlying problems we now face.
3
Not mentioned in your response today is the role of education as a contributor to deaths of despair. A good education often leads to greater resilience, internal resourcefulness and resilience. If one’s got a healthy dose of those, life likely seems, less bleak. The state of education in much of America is appalling and barely deserving of the word “education.”
3
I've been an emergency physician in New Jersey for forty years and drug and alcohol treatment is available but the truth is, it doesn't work very well for a lot of people. I see the same people over and over again after treatment. I have no idea what the answer is, but I'm not sure another government program is going to fix things.
12
@Mark Mandell : Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn simply want a massive expansion of the welfare state -- with drastically higher, Swedish-style taxes to fund it all!
I agree with you. I am often upset by how the bootstrap narrative is celebrated by many of the very people most damaged by it. I do believe many politicians hope everyone embraces the personal responsibility narrative, because it keeps them in power and making money. But I cannot comprehend why struggling people vote for them. Why they don’t listen to the personal choices argument, chuckle, and demand universal health care and a minimum wage of $23/hour. Why they don’t believe they’re entitled to the pursuit of happiness and demand accountability. It’s like a gigantic scam has taken place and the people being conned can’t be taken for a ride fast or far enough. I hope you write about it... Thank you for this series!
10
@Tammi. just curious. Who is going to pay for universal healthcare and that 23.00 minimum wage?
Nothing is free. Your McDonalds burger will cost 12 bucks if not more.
The answer out of minimum wage is education.
@Tammi : a minimum wage of $23 an hour?
Why stop there? why not $50 an hour? or $100 an hour?
You can print as much money as you want, right?
It is strange that those who criticize , cannot see that but for the grace of god, that could be me.
But there is another issue. Many years before globalization took root, the rich and affluent had a stake in bettering the less fortunate in their communities; and so a rich manhattanite had more in common and interest in say a local bus driver or nurse who may fall upon bad times. Now the same rich folks say they have more in common with the elite in Paris, London, Beijing etc, than the economically worse off in their local communities.
The support for Trump had its roots in part, in such sentiment. If the rich vote to lower taxes, lower school and social spending, it is inevitable that more people will be hurt. I don’t know how this might turn around, but the rich and affluent cannot believe they can live on an island, separate from the local populace; and be happy.
7
@boston123
Sad to say, it's not just the rich voting for Republican "values", it's the very red staters that that are described in Mr. Kristof's telling. And plenty of rich people vote for socially responsible Democrat values too.
2
The deaths are a combination of factors which include the degradation of American society and personal responsibility. The worse our society becomes, the easier it is for people to use drugs and end their lives. Unfortunately, greed is the national religion and there is a very high cost when society doesn't provide support for those who need it the most.
5
I agree that we need a cultural shift to a morality of grace. One of the most damaging forces that leads America in the wrong direction and contributes to this social Darwinism is the cult of rugged individualism that has been a common American way of thought. What America needs is to value what we can do and be together, rather than worship the idol of independence from one another. So many good things require many people to do them. And the most overlooked, obvious and so often (and without thought) derided example of us coming together is our government. Safe highways, clean air and water, safe airlines, safe food, a strong education system (until its funding was gutted) are among many examples. A more comprehensive medical system (healthcare insurance for all) would save many like the Knapps. As an emergency physician, I see examples every day of people I don't know how to help, because our country has discarded them and refused to invest in their wellbeing. This failure to invest in children and the poor is dragging our country down. I hope we wake up to this fact as a country (and its government) before even more irreversible damage is done.
1
@Phil Wright when my 55 year old ex husband, IT professional said he wasnt going to look for another job, he was going on the Obama 2 year plan (unemployment), I said bad choice. You will be 57 and unemployable. I was the stupid one. When, 7 years later anxiety and depression set in and he went broke, I stepped up to make sure he didnt lose his house and could eat. I virtually adopted his 2 dogs but they lived with him. 6 months later, he shot himself and ended his pain.
He CHOOSE at 55, to make himself unemployable. Why, his words "It should get easier as you get older." No, it gets harder when competing against the young folks whose brains are faster. Do it anyhow till you cant. Guess he couldn't any longer. We miss him, including his dogs who live with me and his sons. Tragic.
Life is intrinsically unfair. When all the odds are stacked against one, some people fail, while some achieve. For many people, the choice is not between good and bad, it is between bad and worse. The combination of a toxic family and poverty destroys many, while others rebel and remove themselves from the fray. Some people have a safety net; others don't. It really makes one decide to believe that it is better to be lucky than good.
7
Mr. Kristof -- I think your message is correct but your audience is wrong. More than 90% of all the readers of the NYT agree with everything you have written in this piece and the preceding one, but those sympathetic readers do not live and vote in red states or in the red regions of blue states (like Yamhill, OR). To achieve the changes you seek, you will need to convince the people in those red states and red regions. Your work in a place like the NYT editorial page is already done.
5
That’s not true. Liberals are guilty of perpetuating this narrative as well. And of blaming others when they are not as successful. Just replace the rights talking points with the left’s “the secret”. There is an entire belief system that says if you think good things you will get money. If you think negative thoughts you won’t. This thinking, in different degrees, is all around me in the pseudo liberal crowd and believe me - being poor is not cool- I must have done it to myself - . And isolation ! People love success, they do not come around when you struggle.
My grandfather came home from the First World War, having served in the trenches and suffering through at least one gas attack. He was not the same man after he came home. I knew him as an unpleasant drunk who’s smoking exacerbated his respiratory problems. My Dad remember him as a fine athlete and “one of the smartest men in town”, and cabinet maker before he was unable to deal with his illness. My grandfather died early, Was his decline the result of personal choice? There was no PTSD diagnosis for him, only whispers and excuses in small town Minnesota. In the last 40 years, that town has suffered its own traumas and decline as prosperity withered, with farms abandoned, a closed creamery, shuttered lumber yard, an empty elementary school, and depleted small businesses. The population has dwindled to well under 200. The same drug epidemic and economic trauma has struck the hard-working Mid-western Scandinavian and German population that poisons Kristof’s home town. Neither cruel judgment nor social Darwinism will fix the collective traumas of job loss, irrelevance, and loss of place. Those ‘good Christians’ who condescend to blame the afflicted for their travails, should look to them selves and thank their lucky stars and privilege (not god) and work to provide the means to address the causes. The problems are far larger than our ability to fix them with charity.
11
Their fault or ours?
I suspect Mr. Kristof knows the answer to that, as does every first-year biology student.
Phenotype equals genotype plus environment.
People's outcomes are a result of an interaction between how they are made and what they encounter. We can't change how we are made (except to a very limited extent), but we can change the environment.
Many people who are now in despair would not kill themselves if they had jobs, families, social support.
I'm not breakin' any new ground here. Pretty simple stuff.
12
My view, based on living in Canada and being inundated with American culture, is that the myth which is central to the American identity killed your friends. The myth? That those who achieve success in America can claim personal superiority as the root cause - and completely discount their access to good schools and resources, great teachers, inherited intelligence, and perhaps most important of all, shear luck. If their success is to be credited to their personal virtues then your friends’ struggles and failures must be due to their personal flaws and inherent weakness, and thus worthy of only contempt.
19
One of the most powerful lessons I recieved from my mother was "there but for the grace of God go I." You can never know how you would act if you were in another person's position. What you have in this life is entirely based on luck (or God's grace, if you prefer) - the luck of your birth draw, the luck of the combination of genes and life experience that keeps you from a predilection for addiction, the luck of having encouraging parents, the luck of your own personal gifts. I believe the basis of the desperate clinging to the mantra of personal choice is fear - Americans want to believe they can control everything. "I wouldn't have made those mistakes. I will never have a heart attack because I exercise. I will never get cancer because I don't smoke or drink or eat meat. I will never go into bankruptcy due to medical debt because I'm healthy and careful." And this works great until you get hit by a non-careful driver, or you get cancer for non- lifestyle reasons (the vast majority of cancers), or you lose your job to a recession. We can't control fate, so we might as well help those in need - they could just as easily be ourselves.
8
@Shelby : I cannot control biology nor my inherited predisposition to certain ailments....I cannot control getting hit by a car, or developing cancer.
I CAN decide not to do drugs. I CAN decide not to drink alcohol to excess.
I CAN decide not to cook meth in my apartment.
1
An excellent column that describes the actual situation. Maybe, if there were 24 hour a day free childcare, just maybe we could equalize the chances for the children of poor and rich parents. Maybe better would be more extensive social care. Those who denigrate this as "socialism" should remember that the poor children are the taxpayers of tomorrow. Their small income will hurt the middle class as well.
4
I am still trying to wrap my brain around Christianists (as Andrew Sullivan labeled them) who believe in social Darwinism, and yet we have known for years that in practice, that is what animates the political stance on many issues of the religious right.
2
The availabilty of recreational drugs may have something to due with the trajectories of these lives. I grew up in a solidly middle class town in suburban Marin County, California in the 50's and 60's. The parents of all my friends were professionals. Marijuana, LSD and psilocybin came into my neighborhood in '66. Within a few years five of the kids in my high school were dead from drug related causes; two were murdered, one OD'd on barbiturates, one drove his car off a cliff, one died of hypothermia while in an alcoholic stupor, and one asphyxiated in his mushroom greenhouse. Only one kid in my neighborhood graduated college. One never graduated high school. My next door neighbor became schizophrenic. I'm not saying that all of us were unsuccessful, but I suspect of at least some of us would have had different lives without teenage drug use.
9
alcohol. Alcohol is still the worst killer and it has been legal and around the longest.
1
@Sport : much of the cause of all our current problems with drugs, comes DIRECTLY FROM THE LEFT -- which said smoking dope was cool and getting high was normal and natural.
1
One of the most off-putting aspects of perhaps a majority of these comments is the assumption of their writers that they have a "compassion" that others refuse to show. I suspect many of these writers are in the "Helping Professions."
Most of us are compassionate. But. some of us realize that all the virtue-signaling rhetoric in the world cannot prevent poor personal choices. People are often obtuse to the point of perversity and, do-gooders not withstanding, spend their handful of decades on earth hurting themselves.
The parson/father in "A River Runs Through It" summed Reality well when he said, at his son's funeral, that the the hardest thing in the world is to want to reach out to rescue someone who is self-destructive -- only to realize they don't WANT your help.
7
When institutions are predatory and society is indifferent, the less-able suffer. At the very least we should help and encourage people to have no more children than they can easily afford. Two kids are easier than five.
5
Thanks for writing about your childhood neighbors, Mr. Kristoff. I agree and would like to amplify your thoughts about the fault not being with them, but with us.
It is so sad that the pro-life crowd does not value the lives we have in our communities already, the very lives they wish to lock up and remove from their sight--but the average “successful” American is also to blame.
We have become a very mean, angry, resentful country, and the primary target of our meanness, anger, and resentment are the people known to corporations as “resources” and “cost”, to the medical community as the “un-insured” and so on. Perhaps if we changed our vocabulary, we would find our attitudes softening. We need to save every American, no matter how “low” we think they have sunk--for it will take all of us, every one of us, to undo the disastrous evil our greedy and ignorant behavior has had on the planet we live on.
7
This article has put its finger on a common narrative that confuses personal responsibility and opportunity with overall social opportunity.
Is it true that some people, through a combination of luck, diligence, fortitude, talent etc can escape the situations you describe? Yes.
But that possibility for individuals does not mean there is an overall problem for most people.
Try this thought experiment. Let's assume everyone behaved, always, like they should -- all the diligence, education, hard work, moral, clean living prescribed. Do we think poverty would be eliminated then? Do we think if everyone did just what they should poverty in America would vanish and these towns would recover?
The answer is "No." Because poverty is baked into our economy and society. And more and more of it every day. That is what we need to fix.
4
While it is abundantly clear that the US treats its poor with a cavalier cruelty that would rightly not be tolerated anywhere else in the developed world, it is also true that the Knapps and their peers have to deal with America as it depressingly is, not as we would wish it to be. Telling them they are victims deprives them of agency and does not help them deal with the misfortune of having been born in the unkindest first world country.
4
Mr. Kristoff, I had the same reaction to the letters to the editor in your previous oped.
Unfortunately, the American myth of unending opportunity as well as the lack of a class consciousness negate any serious attempts to broaden the discourse,
A book I highly recommend by Mark Robert Rank (One Nation Underprivileged) takes this issue head one. He shows how most of us at some time in our lives will fall under the poverty. If that were better understood, perhaps we would have more sympathy.
5
Apparently, what "makes America GREAT!!" is despair. I feel it acutely. It weighs on me daily. I'm sorry for your losses, Mr. Kristoff. I know how very real they are.
8
I'm at least a generation younger than Mr. Kristoff. One thing that scares me is that I see the Knapps not only in my friends and family who skipped college, but also in those who attended, those of us whose prosperous future seems assumed by politicians and both the liberal and conservative elites. Outside of tech and finance, everyone is really struggling, with loans, with housing, with overwork, healthcare burdens and childcare costs. In 2019, four of my friends, all of whom completed college, two of whom are parents, confessed to me that they'd thought about or attempted suicide. The despair is reaching what was the middle class, as all of our aspirations are starting to feel hopeless.
18
@Megan : I am way older than you. I graduated into the Great Recession of the late 70s-early 80s -- the Carter/Reagan recession.
It was greater and deeper than even the 2008 crash……sadly, most have forgotten it, even those who lived through it.
That meant I graduated with my shiny new college degree -- first college grad in my whole entire family! -- into the worst job market in 40 years (indeed, since the GREAT DEPRESSION!).
I floundered and could not find a decent first job, which set me on a miserable loop of lousy part time and temp jobs, or work that was required to be done "under the table for cash". I am going pay heavily for that now, 40 years later, in a lower SS check.
I got no sympathy, and in fact...blame and contempt from family, friends and (much luckier) colleagues. I am sure there were some dark nights when I thought about ending it all -- after all, I'd done EVERYTHING RIGHT! no drugs -- no unwed pregnancies -- no drinking -- put my nose to the grindstone to get good grades and graduate on time. NONE OF IT MATTERED.
I see some of this coming back, as it did for a while in the 2008 economic crisis. Today, there is a boom so it is dismissed. But it is there, under the phony prosperity.
TOO MANY PEOPLE.
NOT ENOUGH JOBS.
1
We shouldn’t ignore the single greatest determinant in life; luck.
To ignore both the good and the bad kinds and pretend they don’t exist gets us stuck in these circular arguments about virtue and guaranteed results for hard work.
If chance has a real say in our lives then that means there are “undeserving” winners and losers among us and if that is the case, then Darwinistic reasoning needs to take a back seat and we need to focus on the social programs that create opportunities for everyone.
4
Sadly, I think that for us to move from pointing fingers to offering hands, we must also acknowledge that our 'success' in life is not attributable solely to having made the 'right' choices but also to our privilege. As a white middle class American, it is much easier for me to ask if I can work hard and achieve financial stability, then why can't the Knapps. However, I have benefited from a system that was created by the white upper class to perpetuate the current class structure denying upward mobility to the working class and people of color.
4
@K The Knapps were white, and were middle class, as proved by the ability to buy that new Mustang for their 16 year old. What they were not is educated. It is not white privilege or class privilege that is at issue., Nor is it clear that the upper class are better off in a system with little mobility rather than one with more. We will not solve our problems with shallow thinking.
I think the issue is more complex than just a simple personal responsibility argument or society changed and those poor Knapps were just hapless victims argument.
People are more complex than that. The reality is that republicans have succeeded in destroying much of the social safety net and have generally made it harder for the average person to get by.
I believe that personal responsibility does play a role. Unfortunately, it’s gotten easier to make poor decisions and it’s tougher to recover from them in today’s world. People like the Knapps are not the problem. Greed and a government rigged to protect corporations over people is the main problem.
People will always make poor decisions. It’s time for government to help folks take responsibility for their actions, learn and move forward. Not just help rich people and corporations.
4
Interesting how this phenomena - deaths of despair attributable to loss of jobs - has become a sad state now that it affects the lower working class white population.
When the same phenomena affected PoC, it was pathologized.
Maybe the people who are largely affected by this shouldn’t support the GOP, a party which expressly promises to cut government services from which this cohort has historically benefited more than perhaps any other....
4
Sorry. You are still not dealing with reality. This piece describe the perfect world that should have existed.
It did and does not. Now give us ideas about dealing with generations overrun by addictions and illiteracy.
When people have rejected 'learning' by the age of 20, they have rejected it for their lifetime. "Life's too short to spend it with a book," I've heard many no/low income people say.
6
Completely agree with this column. The only way forward for humanity is love and compassion for fellow human beings: no matter what their culture, class, religion or country is. When I see a failing and struggling soul I can see my own failure, where I am failing to help a fellow human being. I can’t help everyone on this planet but I try my best to help the fellow planet earth dwellers around me.
Effective public policies are needed to provide a strong foundations for a stable and productive society. Give everyone access to good education, nutrition and transportation and then we can see the wonderful things that we humans can realize. We need more compassion and less competition.
3
This followup was needed, and it has generated some perceptive comments.
There is never a clear direct line between economic hardship and all individual drug and alcohol abuse. Almost anyone can pick out those who did well despite obstacles, or those who died or damaged their lives, unable to find a way around them.
When you look at the overall life of a community over time, however, wherever it may be, a chronic lack of economic opportunity, and education, appears strongly tied to presence of these behaviors - - as an expression of hopelessness, which becomes more and more rooted in the families over generations if not somehow interrupted.
I have terrible fears about the loss of evermore jobs as industries become "efficient."
I think fear is also one reason are so critical of those who have "failed" due to "their own choices." It is terrifying to think we - or our children or grandchildren - might find themselves so desperate. So telling ourselves that THOSE people are very different from US, but not so smart, lazy, self indulgent: this is so much safer than seeing broken human beings who are not all that different.
8
Have just finished the book - powerful, but unfinished in the sense that there is not a diagnosis and prescription; but that is not your responsibility to provide. (I am a former resident of Yamhill County.)
Between 1950 and 1980, Oregon went from 500,000 to 100,000 jobs in in the forest industries; wood chips to silicon chips in a generation. Yamhill County adjoins Washington County where the knowedge based industries were booming.
Why couldn't the kids on your school bus make the move?
Part of the answers comes from the intergenerational transfer of learning ability - parents who are not educated have difficulty in transmitting values and learning skills to their children. The great English economist, Alfred Marshall, commented on the intergenerational transmission of poverty for the coal mining and textile worker families of England at the end of the 19th century.
Much more to be said - thanks for raising consciousness about the scale and nature of the problem
10
I had conflicting emotions when I read the original story. As a country we need to invest in families, healthcare and education so that the middle class can return and thrive. But, when I read the original story, it was difficult to figure out the root cause of the tragedy. Would better schools, more healthcare, or better jobs kept the "kids" off drugs? Drugs and addiction seemed like the root cause of the tragedy in this family. What I have a hard time understanding is the impact of family/community culture and personal responsibility, and to what extent that brought about this tragedy. I came from a middle class family and have had some tough things happen to me, including an accident requiring long periods of pain/opiod treatment. Yet, I didn't go down the rabbit whole of addiction or give up. I think what saved me was a strong family and spiritual values, and truthfully I am not sure how as a society we enable people to have those things, in addition to what we all agree is necessary: healthcare, education and decent jobs.
7
I agree with this, but referring to those affected as “workers” not “people” even here hints to me just how far we have to go before we can do what’s necessary to correct course.
2
@grace
I disagree. The vast majority of Americans ARE workers, whether they be past, current, or future workers. The necessity of working for a living is what unites most of us no matter our race, gender, age, or any other demographic data point you care to compare.
Yet no other developed nation is as hostile to its own workers as the United States. Why? Because we, meaning society as a whole as well as policymakers, have ignored that necessary component of life in this country. We've not only ignored it, we've looked the other way while a lower standard of living for anyone who works for a living became a policy goal for one party and something to be pushed under the rug by the other.
Margaret Bourke-White's famous "World's Highest Standard of Living" photograph was thought to be ironic due to the black/white contrast (yes, I'm aware that it was not in fact a photo of a bread line and so there is controversy) but I see irony in it as a contrast to today's United States. You would never see such a thing as a higher standard of living being touted as a good thing these days. No politician would stand up on the world stage and crow about a higher standard of living. That wouldn't be seen as "business-friendly." (Photo here: https://bit.ly/2sI9yIu)
In order to "correct course" we MUST address and improve the worklives of Americans. In order to do that we must see them as the workers they are.
3
Your book is spot on, points well made. What you do not discuss is the failure of the American church. Whether rural or metropolitan, the church has lost relevance because it has taught lies. The "God helps him who helps himself", the message of self-healing and self-empowerment, these are the falsehoods preached from pulpits that exist to satisfy the congregation, without whom, the clergy would have no success. Jesus taught forgiveness, grace, mercy, sacrifice. He hung out with the low life, the failures, those who had made bad choices.
In this world, for everyone, there will be tribulation. There will be negative consequences to choices. But to the Christian, the response could and should be, not to self-heal, not to self-sufficiency but to turn to Christ for help, to realize the true depravity of our nature.
Now I know in a few paragraphs I cannot begin to cover the ramifications of what I have said, but my opinion is this. I will wager that the harshest responses to your comments came from individuals who consider themselves Christian. God, please have mercy on me and these people.
5
How do we accomplish the hard things? No one wants theirs taxes raised, their social security reduced or their investment vehicles to nosedive?
1
Thank you for this and for the original article.
Child poverty in Britain is worsening again because of cuts. ("austerity") and the Brexiteers are going to start dismantling the NHS.
9
I am a first generation immigrant who has lived in the US for almost 30 years and has been a US citizen for 10 of those years. What I saw during this time is the increasing cult of non-responsibility for one’s own actions. This change is particularly stark in relation to school discipline (or lack thereof) and the criminal justice system. In school kids operate in an increasingly consequence free environment, where no matter what they do, they don’t face any substantive consequences for their actions. This rise of social promotion and “restorative discipline” practices is motivated exactly by the kind of thinking that Mr Kristoff advocates. This thinking may be well intentioned but it leads to disastrous results. The schools are descending into violent chaos, where nobody is able to learn. I see similar trends in the criminal justice system. Nobody is responsible for their actions anymore. They blame the society, their parents, their genes but not themselves. It’s always somebody else’s fault. Most reforms in the criminal justice system proceed in the same direction, and with similarly disastrous results. The New York bail reform is a prime example.
We should try to help people who need help and who make a genuine honest effort to get over a specific difficult situation that arose due to external circumstances.
But we should not reward and continue making excuses for people who engage in dangerous and harmful conduct.
13
@Berto: That's a lot of rhetoric and not much proof. We're supposed to agree with you, based on your personal observations, and not much else? Where are your statistics showing increased "violence" and "chaos" in schools? Which schools? Where? All across the country? My experience of raising a child in American school systems has revealed little violence or chaos among the students, but there is quite a lot of hostility involving teachers, administrators, and state legislators, especially over inadequate funding, excessive administrative overhead, and ideologically driven legislators trying to starve the public school system out of existence. That's where the chaos exists, as far as I can see. But that's just my opinion, which happens to contrast with yours, and neither of us have really proved anything, have we?
9
@Allison, before coming to NYC two years ago, I lived for almost 20 years in a medium size midwestern town. Several years ago the school system there eliminated the position of Deans (who had been previously responsible for discipline) and changed the rules making it almost impossible to suspend any students. The teachers lost any authority to impose discipline and just about the only thing they were now allowed to do is to call the police in case of serious violent disturbance. Predictably, the violence exploded. There were constant vicious fights (many of which gang related), vicious beatings and bullying, assaults on students, teachers and staff. After several mass fights and shootings at Friday night football games, those games had to be cancelled altogether. The school district superintendent held numerous emergency meetings with outraged and worried parents, but nothing really changed. The superintendent was eventually fired by the school board (and he is now suing the city), but the policies he put in place remain.
Yes, the lack of proper funding and overly restrictive state rules and regulations are a problem, but so are the educational and disciplinary policies of the schools themselves.
5
@Berto Collins: Again, interesting story, but still it is an anecdote about one school district in one area of the country, and to extrapolate from that one example that the situation must be the same everywhere else -- to claim that "violence" and "chaos" is exploding all over the country -- is just not sensible. Let's hope that the Midwestern district you refer to finds a solution for its troubles. Other school districts in other parts of the country are dealing with different problems, but many of the difficulties facing districts can be chalked up to inadequate funding, inappropriate allocation of existing funds, and power games played by state legislators who espouse conflicting approaches to public education. Perhaps if your district had been adequately funded, the position of dean could have been retained. Or perhaps funding for the dean's position was reallocated to other programs deemed more important to state legislators and district administrators. We don't really know, do we?
2
Excellent column.
So many of us believe in the "self-made man," a creature no less mythical than the unicorn. The choices we make are as much the product of our genes and our environment as is the color of our eyes. We learn to appreciate personal responsibility when we see how it benefits those around us.
We acknowledge this when we invest in churches and schools and scout troops and every other mechanism we can think of to shape a child's environments so that it will shape them.
But when society provides no decent jobs and fails to invest in schools, allows children to go hungry, and when children grow up in environments that offer no future, we say they have flawed character when they fail.
Irresponsible societies produce irresponsible citizens.
3
"My friends the Knapps made mistakes. Of course they did. But they weren’t less responsible, less talented or less hard-working than their parents or grandparents who had thrived in the postwar era."
This is true, but not only in the sense Mr. Kristoff thinks. It was not exactly responsible for Mr. Knapp senior to give his 16 year old son a brand-new Ford Mustang, as the article recounts. And both generations seems to have had children at a very young age.
But the problem remains, why is it that the earlier generation did not suffer the disasters of the younger, if both were equally responsible/irresponsible?
The America of 1960 was more forgiving of the faults of white people, especially white men, than the America of 2020. The world is more meritocratic now than then. This is progress, but it has its social costs as well as benefits. To pay for them, we need a more expensive and expansive social safety net.
3
Jobs and opportunities may have changed over 50 years which means our personal goals and strategy must change too. What has not changed is our government’s approach toward problems: legislate, throw money at a problem without oversight and accountability. The “housing problem” in California is a good example. It’s rife with special interest influence. We are being led to believe that more affordable housing is the solution to homelessness. It is not. Mental health and substance abuse rehab, a tougher less lucrative solution, is needed far more than housing. My point is any one dimensional solution will fail. So while the Knapps parents were “successful” in the post war period the environment for subsequent family members has changed. The solution is adaptation on both sides: the citizen and the government approach toward services.
4
Great opinion piece, bravo! Kinda reminds me of one of the components of John Rawls justice as fairness doctrine: our society is judged by how well we treat the worst off, not by how we treat the well off.
6
Social Darwinism is still alive and well in America. We forget how big a role luck plays in our lives. We all have made bad choices at some point in our lives, but thanks to good luck they have not been catastrophic when similar choices might have been for the less fortunate. Personal responsibility extends beyond ones self to a responsibility to look out for others.
4
Thank you for responding to such astounding lack of compassion with this follow-up article. Americans have become so judgemental and hard-hearted. They forget that their neighbours are human beings. Where is our morality?
14
Once gravity has reversed for somebody, there's frequently no longer any such thing as luck. Also tends utterly to transform DNA, so forget persuasion.
But the luckless who nonetheless subscribe, which is the majority of the cult . . . ?
1
Nicholas Kristof is absolutely right. I have always admired America's reverence for personal initiative — but the downside is a puzzling blindness to situations where an individual's initiative or talents are irrelevant. The obvious example concerns health. It is simply uncivilized to add financial injury to someone who has become sick. It amounts to "kicking a man when he's down" — which is the correct metaphor when the victim has inadequate health insurance. It is outrageous that the US is the only advanced nation without some form of universal health care. Those who glibly criticize "socialized medicine" (forgetting that they appreciate having "socialized" roads, public schools and defense) seem to forget that the US pays much more for its health system than other nations — but for worse results in a host of categories, from infant mortality to life expectancy. To that I would add the craziness of the justice system, with a mind-boggling level of incarceration — with precious little scope for rehabilitation. That expensive social tragedy results, at least in part, from the power of the prison guards (eg in California) and the private-prison industry to influence politicians desperate to finance their election campaigns.
11
The Democratic-controlled House passed a Bill to raise the Minimum Wage to $15 an hour on July 18, 2019, yet the Republican-controlled Senate won't act on it.
So, Mr. Kristoff, you are wrong to claim that "Congress and President Trump do nothing" to address poverty in the United States.
Democrats in the House have obviously addressed poverty in this bill -- raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour -- and other bills but the Republicans in the Senate have refused to act on them
I know, I know you don't want to "blame" anybody, but you shouldn't accuse Democrats of not doing anything to address poverty when they clearly have.
12
The Knapp family are casualties of what America has transitioned into over time. An elitist society. Government operations focused on the best interest of the corporate/finance sectors. The American worker/wage earner abandoned by both political parties, That being accomplished by Democrats and Republicans alike each in their own distinctive way. As the Republican Party became overrun by right wing extremists, the Democrats became a brand of Republican Lite. A dynamic that resulted in leaving a significant population of Americans like the Knapps marginalized and struggling. For whatever the issue at hand, the American way of life in the 21st century has become prefaced by one shout out: “Show us your money!”
9
Sympathies to mother Knapp.
But the Knapps indeed were "less responsible" and "less hard-working than their parents or grandparents who had thrived in the postwar era."
Many who hail from even less get by and some even flourish.
No reason that a family of this size could not have pooled their resources and made ends meet, even with clerical, service, or temporary jobs. Live together under one roof, raise well-adjusted children, and do whatever it takes to get by.
This is not scorn, but an expression of incredulity that individuals who lapse into drug addiction and the like for no credible reason are given a pass.
12
No one “lapses into drug addiction for no credible reason.” The original piece, as well as this follow-up, outlines a dozen credible reasons for what happened to the lives of the Knapp children. They grew up in an era when self-righteousness outpaced compassion. The social contract is broken. The people with status, power, and money, by and large, despise those beneath them, and the bitter irony is that people who themselves struggle jealously guard what they claim to have earned all on their own. Wanting to identify with the tier above them, they find comfort in disdaining the needy. Americans don’t want to believe we are “in this together.” Perhaps that’s the essential human “original sin” — the belief that “I” matter more than “you” do.
2
Thanks for this great piece, Mr. Kristof, and I'm sorry that your community has suffered, and continues to suffer, such tragic, needless loss.
The causes of the current state of affairs are many: the opioid crisis, the Great Recession, the decline of coal mining jobs in Appalachia, the loss of US manufacturing jobs due to NAFTA, mechanization, globalization, etc. These have all played a role, no doubt. As someone who, as of late, has been reading and reflecting on the works of Wendell Berry, perhaps the roots of our current crises can traced back to the decimation of the family farm. How much has the primacy of a farming way of life declined in your Oregon community and might your community be reflected in Mr. Berry's prophetic writings?
2
and yet, many people react with horror and outrage that a presidential candidate (or two) wants to provide everything you mention to our citizenry: fre education; health care; job training and more.
what are they so afraid of? tRump is catapulting our nation into the depths of bankruptcy and disdain for everything but money and guns- any democratic presidential candidate wants to focus on the greater good. That IS the American Dream.
9
Thank you, Mr. Kristoff for focusing your powerfully warm light on the ongoing loss of so many colorful and scented human candles. Unfortunately, despite receiving many economic opportunities from family members and friends, one of my brothers continued to make bad decisions as a young man regarding drugs and his healthcare. He died last year at age 54 after receiving amazing end of life care as a Medicaid patient in a heavenly like Lafayette, LA nursing home. As most of us know, it is very challenging to teach someone how to make better decisions in life. As family members and citizens, we must continue to enable misguided members of society - to make better decisions, then reward them for progress. In the long run, this will cost taxpayers and society members less in terms of our rapidly wearing social fabric. Throughout his tortured life, my brother was surrounded by mostly caring, well-meaning Republican voters - that consistently voted to remove funding from resources that are proven to help those in psychological - financial need make better decisions in life.
8
I am not surprised that a rallying cry for retribution came St. Louis. Sadly, our city is mired is this kind of thinking. A couple of examples from my neighborhood ... mostly white, middle class, single family homes. I was in my backyard one summer afternoon when 2 squad cars sped down the alley - a couple of doors down, a late-middle aged woman was sitting on a retaining wall. I could not tell her race - but the grey hair was unmistakable. It was a hot, humid day ... 4 officers surrounded the woman and started harshly interrogating her. The woman never raised her voice and for 45 minutes answered all their questions. One of the officers approached me, "Did you call this in?" No, I replied, I am just waiting to see if she wants some water. Eventually, they took her away. She went willingly, I hope they were taking her home. But I have to wonder at such a police response for such a trivial incident and why a neighbor felt the need for police protection. More seriously, a 13 year old boy was shot and killed while vandalizing cars in the alley. The "castle doctrine" was sited as justification - even though no one builds their castle in the alley. The comments on our neighborhood blog were filled not with horror at the death of a child over a property crime, but with the likes of comments such as those you quoted from Jonathan and Ajax. I hope that "morality of grace" is an idea whose time has come. Thank you for your compassion, Mr. Kristoff
8
@Deborah My younger brother vandalized some cars in a parking lot 40 years ago. (Removed tires in broad daylight and was caught red-handed.) He was busted and yelled at, and he's been a productive member of society ever since then. There but for the grace of God...
My niece shoplifted from a dept store, was caught and yelled at, and has been squeaky clean for the last 20 years. There but for the grace of God...
I cannot fathom that so many people believe the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for property crimes.
So sorry that you experienced first hand some of the rudeness our fellow men and women can dish out.
When I was a student in college - I had a professor who I greatly admired for his ability to engage us in the classroom, but he and I had an occurring disagreement - he taught psychology and he would continue to say “the problem is never out there” and I agreed with him to a certain point then I would add that independent factors can affect our response to problems like our inability to pick what race we are born into and our parent’s financial circumstances. Being borne a minority or poor does affect us and how we cope with problems. He told me I spoke like a social worker and that might have helped me decide to become one.
I no longer work as a social worker but have not given up on my belief that the problem may not always have personal ownership!
5
Early childhood education is essential, as is emphasizing its importance to parents. Should we absolutely have universal access to preschool? Of course. But it does not take access to preschool to know that using drugs is a terrible idea, and making and selling drugs is despicable. I feel sorry for the young children and grandchildren of these 5 siblings who are paying the price for their elders' mistakes.
And yes, America can do more to help the marginalized. But am I willing to forgive the oldest sibling who cooked and sold meth and probably contributed further to your community's disintegration? No I am not. I'm surprised that you are.
6
There are several comments here about addiction treatment centers, to which I feel the need to attach a warning.
Please vet all inpatient programs carefully. Many exist solely for the purpose of profit (even many "non-profits") and don't offer effective treatment. They actually feed patient addiction (and/or turn a blind eye to inpatient drug abuse) to keep them in treatment as long as insurance pays.
7
This article is spot-on. My Midwestern libertarian brother calls me a socialist (as if that's an insult) but to me, that's exactly what this nation needs to combat our myriad problems. How do two people who grew up in the same conservative family develop entirely different political philosophies? I say it's (mostly) life experiences: he's never left the Midwest and has followed the tried-and-true path to success, which is college, job, marriage, kids. He is hard worker, would never cheat anyone, hate the president, but refuses to consider any other mindset than libertarianism. He's never lived (or visited) socialist Europe, the "Left Coast" of CA, or "Taxachusetts". I've worked with undocumented immigrants who've had to leave school in order to pay the rent, and yet, it is still a better life than where they're from (which is mostly due to American foreign policy!). I know this comment is "meandering" (as I would diplomatically write on a student essay) but it is our life experiences that shape our successes and failures -- and our political beliefs. If only we could truly see and understand what others have experienced. Any reader who worships this myth of personal responsible should rather disdain their own introspection and compassion for the lives of others.
9
@Jen Maria This has been my experience as well. The siblings who travelled, e.g. distant college, and actually spoke to people they met all morphed into liberals. The ones who stayed near the old homestead (or perhaps worked elsewhere in tight little overwhelmingly white enclaves) remain religious-conservative and are Trump supporters.
i fear there is no solution for the rapid obsolescence of vast swaths of humanity, other than technological steps backward.
but that won’t happen voluntarily.
terribly sad and scary.
3
Excellent article! It is beyond reason that we do not see how collective social responsibility is vital for this country. Thank you for stating the truth and reminding us all to be empathetic and have a ‘ morality of grace’, these two values are sorely missing in today’s society.
3
Taking voluntary collective responsibility is good. Collective dictates from government enforcement is bad.
1
Globalization as a policy, in which US workers were thrust into unfair competition with workers 10K miles away and suffering under inhumane working conditions, was not inevitable.
Corporate sprawl/greed and government complicity paved the way for the dislocation of income from the US to countries having laborers willing to work for less while enduring significant on-the-job hardships.
This globalization of labor -- corporate outreach for the lowest possible wages and highest possible productivity -- could have been mitigated by forward thinking government policies and corporations placing an emphasis on community and human capital.
However, the net draining of prosperity from the US to the rest of the world is a breach in the dike buttressing American wealth that no finger, no matter how wise or empathetic, is going to stanch.
I listen to people in their 90's tell stories of their childhoods during the 1920's and 30's. By today's standards it was grim: None wore shoes during the summer; very few graduated from high school, having instead to do off to work at age 14 to support their families; children begged teachers for food -- "We had nothing to eat today," they would say.
After WW2, the pendulum swung wildly to the West and in America's favor. The competition was devastated by war or so technologically backward that the US had an easy time of it.
Post WW2, the US was reborn on third base and was convinced it had hit a triple.
The reckoning is now upon us.
10
Kristoff's take on this is exactly right. A corollary attitude that also shapes our world for worse is that those of us who are successful were responsible for their success. We are all shaped by forces much larger than ourselves, and should be willing to admit that and be generous (and forgiving) to those who struggle. We all need help every now and again, and society is better off if we're generous in providing that help.
Should a steel worker who grew up in the Mon Valley outside Pittsburgh have known that the industry was going to collapse in the 1980s and never entered the mill, even though the mill had provided good livings for unionized workers for decades? Would Bill Gates have been as successful had he been born in war-torn Somalia? These questions answer themselves.
Bad things happen to good people, and even good people sometimes make mistakes. We are all better off if we can help each other and expect help in return. Judgement is not our place.
8
I know a mom who was in foster care as a child due to abuse and neglect. When she was an adult (barely an adult), she became the guardian of her younger sister who had fetal alcohol syndrome. She later became the guardian of a nephew whose parents were addicts. She barely makes above the poverty line, but couldn’t bare to see her sister and nephew in foster care because her experience was so terrible.
The sister has health issues and the young boy has some developmental issues.
She is overwhelmed. Two extra-needs minors depend on her and her small income. She has to choose between going to work and dealing with whatever health or other crisis of the day. She teeters on the edge of eviction because there is just never enough money for everything.
People can criticize her for not reading more to the 3 yr old nephew, or otherwise investing in her own education. But how can she? She goes from one crisis to the next on a daily basis I.
22
Ah, my beloved Mr. Kristof. I so truly admire your writing, your activism and your heart. In this case, I heartily agree with all your suggested solutions.
But two points, the example you offered-- this "upwardly mobile" family with working father and stay at home mother-- is dissonant with your point. It would have been better illustrated by a father who lost his factory job as it closed and whose children had to scramble to support the family. Instead it followed mostly the child who had a potentially lucrative talent, woodworking, but chose to quit free schooling and cook meth, then went on to have two children that he "loved" very much, but not enough to eschew addiction and neglect which ultimately ruined their lives as well.
Our country was founded and thrived on the Puritan ethic of hard work and clean living, even though humans must struggle for the latter. It is not just a more modern concept here and is a red flag that incenses many who do work hard and don't take drugs or abuse alcohol and thoughtlessly have children they are incapable of taking care of.
Thanks for your sensible and practical prescriptions. I would add one; free treatment of the drug/alcohol addicted with mandatory (here come the scathing posts!) birth control for both men and women. Parental "love" from an addict is just a form of child abuse and neglect. One writer aptly called how many children are brought up today, feral. This to me is the most urgent problem we have now.
10
No article has moved me as this story of the Knapps did.
So I passed it around. And I was horrified by the reaction.
"But none of them finished high school!" said a friend I've known for over 30 years who works for a non-profit whose mission is to try to meet the basic needs of Ethiopian Jews still in Ethiopia. Yet no sympathy for the Knapps.
Set against that was another former girlfriend who took it as a wretching gut-punch because of all the friends she's lost in similar ways. Originally an artist, she suffered crippling RA and has run an auto repair shop for the past three decades.
I did fine as did my brother Ephraim who amassed all manner of advanced degrees. Yet our brother, David, drank himself to death leaving a wife and two children. Thrown out of high school then thrown out of trade school, he was the smartest of the three of us. But he was a machinist and his trade has been vanishing slowly for decades. He'd lost his sense of worth.
Binary judgment of fault is irrelevant. Never has the pace of change been nearly as rapid. It's accelerating still. The demands this places on people are new in human history. The reactions of entire segments of our population are also new, horrifying and poorly understood. The leaders of our economy remain culturally illiterate and our politics is trapped in deathmatch dogma.
Thus comments reflect either empathy or condemnation. People seek clear, evident answers and there simply isn't one. Not yet.
11
I know plenty of "it is their own fault" kind of people. Many are just plain mean, but others are terrified that this may somehow happen to themselves or those they love. If it is a matter of personal choice, then these people can "choose" their way out of it. Like almost everything, life is complicated. It is rarely only choice 1 or 2, there are a lot of factors (some more obvious than others) that can intervene to produce a good or unfortunate life.
8
Most of our recent presidents, including both right-wing Republicans and centrist/neoliberal Democrats, have preached the so-called virtues of “personal responsibility.” I’m so glad that you are advocating for alternative humane and compassionate approach. Collective social responsibility is absolutely needed in America right now. And that’s what Senator Sanders’ presidential campaign is all about.
Not Me. Us.
Bernie 2020
6
I agree with this article, but I really don’t know what the policy fix is. It’s not just throwing money after the problem. The families I see in Oregon (where I live), are so broken. Emotional abuse, lack of emotional intelligence, inability to provide emotionally stable homes. Yes, money can help with some of that—if people had more stable housing and food, for example, maybe they’d have more energy to expend on things other than merely surviving. But toxic family culture is something so difficult to fix. I agree that weaker ties to community/ weaker ties to religion/ focus on consumerism leaves people feeling unmoored and without purpose.
12
Yes! Just yes.
Why do we even have to discuss this?! I’d like to see some of the “personal narrative” people survive with the resources and circumstances the Knapp’s were born with. Sure, the occasional “rugged individual” can do it but that person is rare, it’s cruel to expect everyone to rise above such poverty. And Carson? Speaking of cruel, that man does so much to damage policy in our nation. America the Cruel, not Brave, that has the ring of truth now.
7
Beneficial "competition," that holy grail of capitalism, requires a level playing field. That means health care, education and infrastructure only good, responsible government can provide. One can travel through Yahmill County, as I often do, and see firsthand the gap that separates those who have and those who have not had the benefits of effective government involvement.
7
While we don't know about the internal Knapp family dynamics, I will assume that the kids were abundantly loved by their smiling mother in the photo. to me, the first thing that went wrong is that they all dropped out of high school.
I come from a working-class family that highly valued education, whereas most of my cousins' parents were sort of wishy-washy on education. I was moved to a high school where 90% of my class went to college, but my cousins stayed in the working class town, with about a 10% college going rate, and none of the cousins went to college after high school. My cousins are productive and a big part is likely that they graduated from high school and went to trade schools. Following the norm of my HS, I went to college.
I completely agree that society must be re-prioritized, adn promote the health, education and well being of children.
10
The author says we cannot blame a baby born into poverty for making poor choices. Of course not, but we can legitimately, in the majority of cases, say that the child’s parents made poor choices. Why must it be one extreme or another ? This is why our country is so divided. People are tired of being blamed for other people’s choices. Society is not entirely or even mostly at fault for the sad deaths of this family. It is primarily the fault of the parents and of the adult children themselves.
8
Sadly, both narratives are true. When society does not provide opportunity, more people make "bad choices". At the same time, no one can move away from those bad choices until the person accepts responsibility for the choice and works to find life alternatives.
5
I agree with the gist of Mr. Kristoff's column, but I have to push back on his total focus on economics and policy. There are other factors: rampant materialism, consumerism as religion, the void left by the devaluation of family and community ties - all of which are stoked by our advertising and entertainment industries, among others.
Many Americans are living lives devoid not just of meaningful work, but devoid of meaningful anything.
13
A lack of compassion or empathy is convenient. Perhaps in a land of limitless opportunity such a lack could be accepted. There are no such lands and no such excuses.
2
My wife grew up in a rural area in the Midwest. The people she grew up with who did not leave for more prosperous areas have had a tough go of it. But they have all persevered. They are barely hanging on, but they are alive and are making it. There are no deaths of despair in that group. It may have been the way they were brought up, strong working farm families.
5
"Workers lost their dignity and hope, and that exacerbated the spiral of self-medication and self-destruction, of loneliness and despair..." I can appreciate this being from Pittsburgh while steel mills closed and a depression economy arose in the 80's. But the issues present as the quote shows are psychological arising from external circumstances. We will always have to accept external events as out of our control and imagine ways to respond. It seems the imagined ways in the article was drugs. That is a choice. I have sympathy but some lack of care. My childhood was in Pittsburgh public schools while so many peers fought their teachers and in sometimes ugly ways us 'goody kids' trying to learn. I struggled. Went to college. Became a low paid teacher. Won a Fulbright. Went to law school. Now I reflect on my childhood 'friends' and classmates reflected in this article. You guys/gals created the world you now occupy while fighting me trying to create mine. Now the article says something should be done ... because? of their poor choices? Yes they were choices, begun long ago. Something in me is harsh in my judgment. Maybe it's because I don't see anything that specific group of 'friends' learned from their conduct. And, I guess, yes, the anger here is personal as were the needless hurts in childhood making success more difficult. So. No. I don't see a need to help people who refused to see external change, imagine a healthy response and do it. And I am mostly liberal.
10
Yes, but Nicholas, you have to admit the money's been very, very good for the 1%, and that's what it's all about in the Exceptional Nation during the current Reagan Restoration era.
Historians may look back at the New Deal era as a brief aberration in the American gangster capitalism saga. The Information Age and globalization have only aggravated the rampant exploitation and abuses by aiding the economic leverage held by the corporate plutocracy now in full control.
Game over for the American Experiment.
10
"We moved from an inclusive capitalism in the postwar era to a rigged system that hobbles unions, underinvests in children and then punishes those left behind."
As awful as Trump is, this is the greatest crime perpetrated on Americans since the Robber Baron Era. Sadly, it's been going on long enough that a large number of Americans have never known anything different. They didn't experience the largest expansion of the middle class in history, created by unions, collective bargaining, and active government working to ensure fair labor treatment. Ever since Reagan launched "trickle down" economics, American workers have been under assault, aided and abetted by government policies enacted by Republicans and Democrats both, in service to the 1% and the donor class. Further helping their cause was the co-opting of the Christian Right, and resurrecting the Puritan belief system that blames victims for things beyond their control as proof of their sinful, slothful ways. And that goes hand in hand with the "Law of the Jungle" mentality that rewards selfishness and greed, and punishes the weak and less fortunate.
But mankind formed societies because "survival of the fittest" wasn't working. A group of people is only as strong as its weakest member. "Jungalism" makes us weaker, not stronger, and the declining mortality rate is proof of that.
All those "fit" people who blamed the Knapps better hope others are more generous if they ever suffer misfortune. The jungle is unforgiving.
15
When I was a senior in high school, I got busted (with 4 of my friends) for underage drinking. The police took us to the station and had each of us call our parents so that they could see all the beer bottles, and then take us home for parental discipline. We were all white. What if we had been thrown in jail, arraigned on charges of underage drinking, vilified by "society" a "losers". It is not hard to see how life might have been different. How life is different for those who are viewed as fundamentally "bad".
26
When anyone dies a death of despair we need to ask how the community failed them. Especially suicide. Many who take their often lives are not mentally ill. They are derailed by circumstance. They feel isolated, alone and hopeless. Generally people don't care about anyone outside their immediate family. It seems there's little sense of community. We all play a role in people's ability to thrive and in their demise.
7
So why can we not take the next step and see the horror this country is? Patriotism is a religion that blinds and paralyzes us, and causes us to blame individuals- other individuals, never ourselves!- for our systemic cruelties. With recognition of what we are, what our history is, how deep inequality was and is, perhaps we could actually use our ample resources for all.
6
I appreciated the column and the work generally that Mr. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn have done on this pressing topic. But my comment here is simply this: Thank you Mr. Kristoff for engaging directly and alertly, without defensiveness, to the many other reader remarks here. Too, too rarely do columnists at the Times or anywhere, really, spend the time to converse with readers--a loss for columnists more even than for readers. Yes, I am aware that the authors are promoting "Tightrope," but the honest, two-way exchange of views is refreshing. I encourage other columnists everywhere to do the same! No need to reply to this comment, Mr. Kristoff -- save your time to discuss the actual moral issue with others.
6
It is curious that we have two things happening simultaneously in America: rampant deaths from opioids, while state after state is legalizing marijuana. Drugs were glamorized in the 1960s; the notion of self-medication became an esteemed form of liberty ("keep your hand off my body, government.") Look where that got us. The Knapps are victims of a culture that changed for the worse. And when you see the movement for legalization of drugs gaining momentum, it's clear we're still on the wrong track.
7
I absolutely agree. Part of the government protecting the most vulnerable would be NOT legalizing recreational marijuana for anyone under the age of 25, when the brain and it’s important frontal lobe has finished developing. This kind of legal restriction/protection would be the equivalent of airbags in car crashes that Mr. Kristoff highlights.
5
Marijuana has never killed a person in all of history. The wrong track is when the government allows a more harmful substance to be pushed by pharmaceutical companies than the one you can grow yourself.
Nothing to argue with here.... just one thing.. Name names. America began to change in the 60s when the CEOs decided that economically enslaved workers would boost profits and their salaries... but we still "bought America" and could"buy America." BTW we had lots of pollution. The 60s did bring Medicare but also the birth control pill (good and bad-- disruptive) and Vietnam (the Kne Buns documentary and the new movie "The Report" should be required viewing for Congress- generals lie , the president is often a pawn.)
Starting with and since Reagan, the country has developed this system of predatory capitalism and monopolizations/ conglomerate that I cannot believe. The FED which could raise interest rates won't. Numbers concerning unemployment are cooked. We have lost public transit in too many places. (As GM goes, Ike's Interstates -- yes and no.) There are fixes but moral cowards are we. A nation of bullies and greedy babies.... The emoluments clause won't be enacted. We need to act as if we were Christians caring for fellow creature and the planet, even if we don't believe a word about faith. (Faith, hope and charity and the greatest of these is charity - caritas - love for our fellow creatures.
2
I find the best metaphor for this situation is a lethal game of musical chairs. The system is set up with just so many “chairs,” and it is okay with our society that all those who cannot find “chairs” should be out of the game, that is, die.
We, as humans, determine the shape of society. It is not some cosmically determined form. If people die because of the way we have formed our society, then it is the society in general that is at fault, not those who never had a place in the “game” to start with. To blame the victims just assuages the guilt of the perpetrators.
“We didn’t know at all, we didn’t see a thing,
You can’t hold us to blame, what could we do?
It is a terrible shame, but we can’t bear the blame,
Oh no, not us, we didn’t know.”
We Didn’t Know, by the Chad Mitchell Trio
3
We have a tendency to concentrate on the hatred and the dishonesty in Donald Trump's constant campaign.
Isn't despair a strong component of that poisonous pudding he manufactures?
2
My uncle flunked out of the elite college he sailed into, then he went to a worse college, got a job as a teacher (which didn't work out) and ended up with a desk job in an industry that doesn't exist anymore. He commuted but had regular hours, and obviously in the 70s and 80s there was no working from home.
With this job, he raised 3 kids and sent them to college, and his wife never worked.
He's the biggest "personal responsibility" advocate I know. People just don't understand how much harder the world is today than it was 30-40 years ago.
8
We’ll never know if simply giving people enough money to survive will work until we try. Survival for me and not for thee is something that has a long and bloody track record.
3
Nobody, who's not rich deserves their human rights, or any dignity, or a government that cares about them, and will help them. Right?
2
One thing I either missed in both your articles is what the parents of these children did or didn't do as their children were in school, how they encouraged them to learn and move ahead, what examples they gave them and if they were in need of help for similar addictions and plans for the future. Obviously you Mr Kristoff made it out of that same milieu. Yet you di not reveal what besides inferred luck made you a success and not them.
I am not saying that you are not right in critical thoughts about these failures but as i saw this mother sitting among the graves of her children what did they as parents do. Because as we all know first admitting there is a problem to be fixed is the first step to its resolution no matter if there are any supporting organizations to help you. If you as a parent think it's OK for your child to drop out of school you are part of the start of the problem as much as the school system that does not try to make that not happen.
9
“Natural selection weeding out those less fit for survival.” What an ugly misleading and needlessly cruel concept that has become as American as a poisoned apple pie.
That the worst and weakest of us happen to have an ungodly wealth hoard should decide the fate of the strongest physically and brightest of us they exploit to engorge their wealth hoard proves the survival of the fittest concept a fraud. It doesn't entitle the wealthy to thrive off the back of others without such a hoard of wealth to begin with.
Does anyone think the Sackler family, the Waltons, the Adlers, the Kochs, the trumps and the rest of their ilk are "fitter" than the rest of us to survive? Put everyone on an equal basis from the start and see how well the wealth hoarders do without wealth, healthcare coverage, adequate food, housing, education, while laboring several jobs for punitive wages compared to the rest of us not under their thumb. Indeed, who would despair first?
Those who are poorest yet still manage to survive, in spite of the weight of obstacles inflicted on them from those at the top, are truly the fittest.
The government of the people has betrayed the people by pulling the rug of equality-for-all out from under them, where the greater the wealth the more equal are those at the top - indeed, and are completely unaccountable to anything and anyone fit to survive beneath them on the wealth ladder.
6
I just sampled and will read your book.. It is brilliant and sad. Thank you for your continued journalistic talent.
It appears you made a very poor choice in settling on the Knapp family to illustrate your theories. When every single child in a large family abjectly fails to thrive, there has to be a reason beyond society’s refusal to subsidize their wellbeing. It appears that in looking for victims to help us understand your perceptions, you’ve let sentimentality over your school bus rides overwhelm common sense. It is not the world’s fault that the Knapp family spiraled into disaster.
11
Our modern world of greed, corruption, contempt & conflict is the problem. It's typical of the self righteous people who wrote those negative comments to criticize the victims who were steamrolled into oblivion as weak. The writers were probably driving a steamroller themselves flattening anyone who got in their way. Somehow we need a kinder, fairer world to leave for future generations, but I don't see how we're going to get there from here.
I am glad Mr. Kristof wrote a follow-up column. People need help. All people need help.
1
the writer advocates an increased " social collective responsibility" in the war against addiction ( four of the five Knapp children died of it). That responsibility is limited, I believe, by the right of the addict to be an addict. My professor in medical school used to say that it would be easy to stop addiction: just put every drug user on an island , have the Navy make sure they have no outside contacts, and leave them there indefinitely ( I imagine we could find earth-based solutions if we run out of islands). Less drastic solutions have failed . Methadone treatment is not that common because most addicts do not want it ( it is not the cost: Medicaid pays for it in most cases and the great majority of drug addicts are on it ; I worked in a methadone clinic) The " detox clinics" consist mostly of a three day stay in a hospital-like facility where addict go when they run out of money to buy drugs. Jailing the drug dealers
has not worked : there is an endless supply of them. Perhaps we should try to dry up the demand.
6
It's both personal responsibility and societal factors that lead to deadly addiction. Thus, both should be addressed. I'm not convinced that the model of victimhood and the unproven idea of addiction as disease has been at all successful given the high rate of failure for drug and alcohol treatment programs and the fact that more people are succesful in stopping addictive behaviors on their own than with such programs proves the point. Perhaps we should be focusing more on providing mental health counseling, encouraging creation of stable family life, teaching people how to live more responsibly, and providing job training. Empathy only goes so far unless its coupled with policies aimed at making life better for those in depressing circumstances.
7
I have lived on both sides of this issue. I spent years overseas in a hierarchical East Asian country, working my way up a career ladder. I came to believe in the gospel of virtuousness and personal responsibility - for, like many others, I was sure that my success had been due to my merit and hard work, and, hence, that it was easily replicable.
Then I returned to today's America and struggled to find my footing. The possible career paths I'd expected I might continue along either no longer existed or were not open to me. I was shocked by the first pay cut I had to take upon arrival - I'd been used to earning $40,000 a year and didn't think it exorbitant. But then the next position paid less. And the next paid less than that. Now I find myself over 40 in the service sector earning $10.50 an hour ($21,840 a year), competing like heck and going through multiple interviews to move up to a job that pays $11 - and getting denied. In the meantime, I'd lapsed back into smoking cigarettes again and started drinking more. Why? Because life felt hopeless and lonely, and these were my only little shreds of happiness.
I meet bright, talented people in the service sector all the time who have similar stories. Money comes and goes, they say.
So that's how this works. Thanks, Mr. Kristof, for giving people like me a voice. I wish I didn't understand the phenomenon as well as I do.
11
@Alex
As an addendum, we just had 4 people call in sick today at work, Sunday morning of the MLK holiday weekend, severely hampering us. This is where conservative "personal responsibility" advocates are partially right. But they fail to realize that most service workers aren't paid enough to care and see no hope for recognition or bettering their circumstances.
Basically, those who do get promoted or get ahead are those who are dependable workers. But there are many others who work hard and receive nothing other than getting to keep their poorly paid job. I see people who have been with their employers for over a decade for whom that's the case. So when there seems to be no pathway to a better life, why care - about anything? And many nowadays don't. That's what Mr. Kristof is addressing and what conservatives don't get.
2
I can't go all the way there with you. I do have compassion for this family, and know from personal experience that a helping hand, even one that may seem insignificant to the person extending it, can go a very long way.
But - my experience was to have grown up in a very poor third world country, where a place like Yamhill would have seemed like the promised land. Countless numbers of my country people did assume personal responsibility ( yes, that terrible phrase) for the betterment of their lives, and they did succeed - as POC, with much less resources , and much less to hope for on the surface, than white Americans could really ever imagine. It can be done; it continues to be done.
This will likely be an unpopular view, but merely being born as a white American puts you on second base, in every way. Sad but true in 2020. You have an automatic leg up if this is you. Don't blow it, and think about helping others who are truly less fortunate than you.
8
Responsibility exists on many levels.
My brother-in-law tells a story about his law practice. One year they appointed a partner to chair the compensation committee. It turned out that he was a very selfish, greedy person. Soon everyone in the firm was acting more selfish and greedy, just to protect themselves. Fortunately the senior partners soon recognized what was going on and removed the selfish, greedy partner from compensation committee. Eventually things returned to normal.
This country is being run by policies of greed and selfishness. People are feeling vulnerable and are thus becoming more selfish and greedy as a matter of self-preservation. I see it in myself. I often feel that I need to take care of myself and my family and that everyone needs to do the same.
But let’s try instead to change the system and help one another, always thinking “There but for the grace of God go I”. There are no senior partners to turn things around. We need to do it ourselves.
6
My heart breaks for these stories. I am grateful (and mindful) every day of the advantages I got by virtue of the accident of my birth.
Yet as long as there are parts of the culture that associate hardship with moral failing and rely on religion and mythologies to absolve themselves of any obligation to their fellow humans, this will continue.
Poverty is not a moral failing or a judgment from god. It is a hard fact, and as Kristof points out, we save money when we help, to say nothing of what it does for the soul. In my own life, I have seen the power of helping people to literacy and a path to hope can do in real, cultural and financial terms.
One of the tragedies of our time is that many people stand in judgment of those less fortunate and don't feel any obligation to help our fellow travelers. Even if we can only help a handful of people, multiply that by the privileged in our country, and it can be transformative.
6
Some people are allowed a wide open field they just need to walk across to achieve success. Some people are forced to walk a tight rope in the wind. Those who blame the disadvantaged for their failures don't realize the extent to which people in different places are required to travel such different paths with such different obstacles. The children of the wealthy are allowed to fail many times and still have a bright future. Others are allowed to fail only once, but they are judged the same.
8
Thank you to you and your spouse for writing "Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope." I am reading the book right now and am overwhelmed at how much it captures the longing I feel in my life. I am 75, born in California. My parents were products of the Great Depression and World War II. My father was a blue-collar aircraft worker, a union man and a staunch FDR Democrat. My mother was a homemaker and staunch Republican. I was born at the end of World War II, when they were in their 40s. Those post-war years when I grew up were such a time of promise. And in my home -- despite different political philosophies and two daily newspapers, one Democrat and one Republican -- I learned the value of personal responsibility AND the importance of empathy for those less fortunate. There were no big fights about paying taxes, tirades over helping others or cries of "unaffordable" about our free college and university system at that time. Indeed, I was able to earn a college degree because of that and have a career in which I was able to climb the middle-class ladder. That lasted in California until the late 1970s, when the "tax revolt" swept the state and we began the 50-year political descent into the quagmire of injustice and inequity that plagues our society today. So again, thank you for being voices of hope that we can, if we choose, return to being an America of collective responsibility, striving to bring justice and equity to all our fellow citizens.
6
"...gratuitous cruelty posturing as policy." This is the fundamental realization that I have had about the 42% of America. They revel is gratuitous cruelty. Yes, there are similar individuals in other countries, but generally I do not believe they are as numerous and almost certainly they do not indirectly guide the most powerful military in the world. There's reason for the whole world to worry about such a large group of powerful people who are so committed to gratuitous cruelty.
13
With regard to investing in our children, our future, we see generous investments in education in upper middle class school districts but scant investment in poorer neighborhoods, towns and villages. The ability to benefit from good schools starts with the variability of genetic inheritance and on this foundation environment allows the possibility to grow into full capability. It is generally accepted that genetic intellectual capability is spread according to the "Bell Curve". So the possibility that a child might have a potential high intelligence, is likely to be found without regard to family affluence. When we neglect the education of any segment of the populace we waste the opportunity for our society to flourish. Starting with well paid teachers, quality education with pre-k and healthy school lunches will enhance the possibility that we won't miss the potential Einsteins in any segment of society.
5
Good article. Fighting about assigning responsibility and blame creates a lot of non-constructive waste of time and resources.
It is in all of our interests to raise children and socialize teens and young adults to be able to take care of themselves and have a sense of purpose and achievable goals in life and to provide some help for people on a self-destructive track. Between Jesus-Christian and socialistic values there is enough consensus to take helping actions and even intervention in people's lives if they are off-track, although there is liberal-conservative difference of opinion about what is off-track and the conflict between helpful intervention and freedom of choice. Social workers become very aware quickly of the difficulty of modifying self-destructive family behaviors, but we could do a far better job of providing attractive programs-situations for the young where there are good adult role models, and clear enforced behavioral boundaries that socialize-train both the young and the 'fallen' in psychologically healthy activity and choice-making. Leaving everything to families, the current electronic social world, and the current video world, which is entertainingly captivating, but provides terrible socialization about good choices and workable actions in the face of trouble - is not working well. Blaming immigrants, liberals, or rigid church training is a formula for social war that we will all pay for.
1
I don’t know any family’s not touched by sexual violence, alcohol, drugs, mental illness, autism, developmental disability or serious medical challenges. None signed up for these challenges.
As a psychiatric nurse I worked with a convicted rapist. He was a Vietnam Nam vet who went into flash backs and would attack a woman. I was appalled at the harm he caused and thought he should be in jail taking responsibility for his crime and also protecting women in the community.
Over many months I got to know him and how deeply wounded he was by the war. Many came back addicted or alcoholics; he came back a rapist. He and others did not chose to come home so different. He worked harder than many other patients to change and make amends. He would always be seen first as a convicted felon, a sexual predator not a smart funny man who was changed by circumstances beyond his control.
Poverty, being seen as part of our throw away society damages as badly as war. It isn’t surprising that some fall by the wayside. It is surprising so many survive. Richard Rohr writes “If God is torturer in chief, then a putative and moralistic society is validated...” pg85 The Universal Christ. That’s a world I want no part of.
61
Thank you for this. As a pediatric social worker for many years I’ve assessed and gotten to know hundreds of families, extremely rich and extremely poor, both white and black. I was always struck by how much poverty and yes, bad luck, factored into families’ lives. Being born into a suburb of Philadelphia, versus North Philadelphia, almost always means success in life thanks to wonderful schools and opportunities versus mostly sub par schools, access only to minimum wage jobs and the crushing poverty that follows. Of course there were/are exceptions with Nick Kristof being a case in point in this terrific piece about rural America. But until we stop being so judgmental about those who weren’t as lucky as some of us, our social problems will continue to spiral and result in the grief and loss suffered by way too many people who there, but for the grace of God, go the rest of us.
12
I worry for our future when so many of us wish to cling to our mean-spiritedness rather than look at evidence and set to work repairing our society and our world. Even so fundamental an issue as diet bears scrutiny; if one is not very well educated, it can be very hard to know how to eat healthily, given the unhealthful nature of the average American diet. Throw in the difficulty of access to healthy food, and the costs, and it is not surprising that obesity and diabetes are such a problem. And those health problems, by the way, are not limited to the low-income! We have the resources to do better, and most citizens would support taking the necessary steps. We need leadership that can't be thwarted by the Mitch McConnells of the world.
5
Spot on Nikolas. I can often hear the din of person responsibility come through another way too. It’s the “don’t tell me what to do” mantra. It comes from the gun rights advocates, those that graze their cattle on our public land and people who hunt and trap on public land. Their argument is dripping in irony seeing that they’re using other people’s rights to have their “independence”. I thought your Death of Despair article was an excellent assessment of a national problem. I passed it on to many friends and colleagues.
6
I urge reader’s to read “Tightrope.” Kristof and his wife provide first-hand examples of how the Knapps (representing poor, rural Americans ) children fell victim to specific U.S policies that are now common in the Trump era. What stands out for me is how we refuse to look at how other nations have solved some of these dilemmas by applying humane policies with the welfare of children as a priority. Read the book- then let’s talk!
7
Well said Nicholas.
You are a brave and compassionate man. Your article and response are timeless in this time of difficulty.
We know deep-down that individuals are not commodities, whose primary purpose in life is to be measured for productivity and consumption. We need to awaken again. We need to invest both emotionally and physically in providing opportunity for all. All humans want to feel empowered over their own lives.
The cost to satisfy simple physical and emotional needs is not that great if we work together.
6
I can imagine a United States where personal responsibility is nested in a social reality that abhors poverty and hunger, insists on access to homes and opportunity for everyone, and holds individuals universally accountable for their behavior.
In that world, a Bret Kavanaugh would not be rewarded for his awful choices, and nor would Donald Trump. Every child would easily access quality early education through high school, good nutrition, and a fighting chance to attend a good college or tech school. Everyone suffering from sickness or injury would receive swift, excellent medical treatment and restored to functionality insofar as modern medicine could make it happen.
Then, then, then, cry out all you want about personal responsibility. I'll hear ya. At that juncture, I too will vote for the most conservative person on the ticket!
4
Touche’. Excellent comeback. Yamhill is lucky to have you.
As for Ben Carson, and Justice Thomas for that matter, they seem to forget that all their choices came from decades of struggles for that broader social change. Personal choice, indeed.
10
Addiction is a health problem as some writers correctly point out. The first best approach to any health challenge is education and prevention. Unfortunately, health education has been eliminated in schools for two reasons. Mis-guided educators pushed for "basic science" in the curricula substituting topics such as astronomy for the more relevant, useful, necessary, engaging and "basic" life sciences. Then conservatives introduced No Chlld Left Behind, a mind-numbing, teach-to-the test program that eliminated science, civics, and other essential subjects so students were prepared for the assembly line, not a life as whole persons and effective citizens. Time to get back to meaningful education including life-saving education that includes understanding of the threat of addiction.
1
Bravo for pointing out the responsibility we have to help others to have a better life & overcome their problems. The bootstrap comment is stale and useless. Education and a universal healthcare system goes a long way to making lives better and purposeful.
Power used to set people aside is cruel and doesn't make for nation building.
Were are surely better than that.
3
Though I think the spikes analogy is a little bit of extreme hyperbole, this article made me really think about mistakes.
I think we can all admit, as adults looking back, that we all made mistakes in our lives - it's when the consequences of those mistakes (often the same exact ones) are so different and life-changing that really drives home the true inequity that is going on in modern life.
We are simply too quick to cast the first stone and too often forget that old adage, "But for the grace of God go I."
8
I agree completely with your fundamental argument that a wealthy society should be trying to alleviate economic and social misery, but I don't think you made a good case for that in last week's column.
Most of your examples were chosen from one family. You told us that one son dropped out of school in grade 9, and yet his parents bought him a Mustang for his sixteenth birthday, presumably the next year. That doesn't sound like a family that's suffering from economic despair; it sounds like a family with misplaced priorities--particularly when we read that only one child from this family, well-enough off to buy Mustangs, made it through high school, and that that girl ended up taking meth and becoming addicted even though she'd seen its devastation and knew she shouldn't touch it.
I still feel compassion for this family and every other family like them. I want to see them get all the help they need. But if you want to convince people who don't already agree with that idea, and if you're making the argument that these are "deaths of economic despair," you might want to choose examples that don't suggest a family with deep-seated issues that have nothing to do with the economy--or else explain more clearly why it is that you think they do.
11
I feel like Mr. Kristof has not traveled much outside of the US....If you spend some time in Haiti or Sierra Leone or Yemen you’ll see folks trapped in situations with legitimate lack of opportunity; being semi-literate or semi-numerate upon reaching adulthood in one of these places is completely understandable. In fact, it takes an extraordinary combination of sheer grit and extreme intelligence to succeed in places like these; and of course, very few of us are blessed with that combination of strengths.
Now, let’s turn to the USA. Yes, our education, health care, and economic systems each have problems that deserve attention and improvement. But any person currently struggling to educate or feed themselves in one of the countries I mentioned above would succeed in spades if given the opportunities and resources that we have in even the poorest sections of our country.
So I believe that the problem is primarily with _us_, not with our system. While some parts of our country have it easier/better than others, in the grand scheme of opportunities for a good life on planet earth, every American has won the lottery. What we do with our winnings is up to each of us individually.
5
Why do you compare the USA to one of the poorest nations on earth? Shouldn’t the comparison be to other first world nations? US is far behind the rest of the first world in healthcare, education, housing and wages.
7
@GBR "I feel like Mr. Kristof has not traveled much outside of the US"
Seriously? Are you even vaguely familiar with Kristof's work? He has traveled all over the world, doing extensive reporting in many of the poorest places on earth. He won a Pulitzer for what the committee called "his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world."
7
Margaret Mead said that women in their traditional roles need political power. I take this to mean women as mothers and caregivers who love and protect the weak among us.
Mothers have come together to inject sanity into destructive policies before. An organized group of mothers ,by putting pressure on politicians, successfully ended atmospheric nuclear bomb tests resulting in harmful radioactive fallout.
Mothers with infants , mothers with disabled children, mothers caring for their own elderly parents have perspective on human development.
The first five years of life are crucial to a child’s mental health.What they need in those first five years is love and safety. Pure, simple and cheap.
1
As an American living abroad for nearly half my life, I more and more view my home country as a predatory state.
As in, it does little to help its citizens succeed and is instead focused on using them to feed the 1% and/or corporations.
Healthcare: basically every other country in the civilized world pays (much less) for better care, and does not tie it to your employer. It’s a basic right.
Finances: predatory lending/credit. Much more controlled lending practices outside of the USA, people cannot get in over their heads nearly as easy. I guess when nearly everyone is in debt for X, the economy is maximized...
Education: by and large affordable, and strong focus on trade schools in the western world outside of the USA.
I go back 4-5 times a year and all am shocked at the lousy infrastructure and lack of support for the average citizen.
16
The "deaths of despair" crisis is the problem cannot be attributed to the lack of personal responsibility or to the lack of societal solutions. It is a combination of both. Mobility within the U.S. is at an all-time low. As J.D. Vance pointed out in "Hillbilly Elegy", people who moved away from small West Virginia towns to larger cities to obtain better paying jobs were considered "traitors" to their extended family. Staying in an area that is dying economically with limited job prospects is a choice people make. With the unemployment rate at 3.5%, there are jobs available if a person is willing to move where the jobs are.
Not everyone living in an economically depressed area becomes a drug addict or alcoholic. Addiction is hard to break but some people accomplish this. And a small portion of the population become addicted even when they are not faced with financial challenges.
The above two paragraphs are the personal responsibility part of the problem. At the societal level, we need to devote more resources to the long-term treatment of addicts as opposed to imprisoning them. We also need to invest in meaningful job training programs to provide factory workers who have lost their jobs with the opportunity for employment that will provide at least a living wage.
3
@Frank Where your argument falls down is, why would most low-income individuals living in depressed rural areas believe they could do better for themselves if they moved? Where would they have learned this? What in their experience would have suggested to them that they had the agency to make a go of it in a city, with an urban economy and lifestyle they had never seen? Vance himself credits his (very structured) experience in the military with helping him to more realistically understand his options. Our judgments about this aren't helpful if we don't actually know people in these circumstances.
Both of your columns about the tragic subject studied in your new book for some reason fail to address the massive elephant in the room. The “obsession with personal responsibility” at the expense of any collective societal and government responsibility is THE defining character of the Republican Party of the last several decades. Full stop. There will be no changes until the Republicans are no longer in control of the decision-making.
14
Yes, there is a lot of collective fault and, yes, the invidious obsession with individual responsibility is harmful. What I object to is the assumption by so many that when urban people of color fall short, it reflects a race-based pathology, but when the actors are white working class or rural people, the fault lies with society. And, if it matters, I am a seventy-seven year old white guy.
16
Thank you for writing this,Mr. Kristoff. I will merely point out that the challenges young adults face today are much more difficult than prior generations. Prior generations grew up with the realistic expectation that if you worked at it, you could land a job with good pay and benefits, and have some fee years of leisure retirement. Deaths of despair often result from the slow realization this is no longer reality.
Today's youth have not even the slightest expectation of obtaining good jobs because they hardly exist in our modern economy. if they survive a public school education without getting shot,they can maybe go to college and rack up $200k in student debt that cannot be eliminated even in bankruptcy court, then work in food services or hospitality with an "uber" gig on the side. Meanwhile concentration of wealth for families at the top (like Betsy Devoss who grew up rich from a Ponzi scheme company) further concentrate wealth through userous loans from private "universities" that misrepresented themselves.
Is it any wonder that teenage suicide is on the rise? We need a dramatic overhaul of this country.
9
Not only teen suicide is on the rise. Veterans, farmers, and unemployed middle age men are also committing suicide.
It behooves is to have compassion when it is well known that there is a significant genetic component to addiction.
6
Opportunity structures are social structures in a child's life like education, peer groups, social networks of parents and neighbors, proximity to good jobs, mentors and role models, access to transportation. Children who have rich opportunity structures can thrive, unaware of their great good fortune.
Housing segregation, poor schools in poor neighborhoods, and few and narrow job prospects make it difficult for kids to find their ways to good work and healthy adulthood. They simply do not breath the same opportunity air as their well-positioned peers.
The longer we take a social Darwinism approach suited for the last century and refuse to think in new ways about creating 21st century opportunity structures that reach the poor and working classes, the long this social disaster will go on. This will cost money, but also the will to re-build communities that care and look out for one another.
7
The United State, the world itself, has seen more rapid fundamental changes since 1945 than in any other period in history. By and large people don't do well with change at pace faster than they can adapt to. Without a real effort to manage change many simply get left behind. Instead of direct environmental change killing off a species, the rapid technological and economic changes killed off livelihoods. How different are those kinds of changes from a climate changing? In both cases, government has a real role to play. In both it's also abdicated that role. The people are the casualties of that.
2
Nick: You are addressing the central problem we face as a nation. We need to extend the concept of personal responsibility to include responsibility to our communities, rather than continuing to narrow personal responsibility to just ourselves.
Rabbi Hillel said: If I am not for myself then who will be for me?If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
Now is the time for us to recognize this 2000 year old wisdom and work to change how we view personal responsibility.
10
Domestic violence occurs in all socioeconomic groups. It is of epidemic proportions in this country. I am beginning to suspect it is a brain disorder. Have worked in field for many years.
Bad choices may manifest when societal expectations do not mesh with economic reality. Our politicians and religious leaders encourage us to work hard but few are willing to share with us that “bad choices” may also include remaining in an economically depressed area while attempting to make a living or marry or buy a house or raise a family. What was so for our parents may be out of reach for us. Rural people did not bust the unions or move manufacturing jobs overseas. Who will tell us the truth? We are at odds with our own interests when we’re tied to the stock market instead of a solid pension or living wage.
7
I'm sorry you received those negative comments. Your essay last week reminded me how much our society choses to forget large numbers of people whose opportunities are limited by their circumstances. We forget them because they have very little political or economic power. It seems every generation needs a breakout book to wake them up. For me, it was The Other America, published in 1962 when I was 20. It's time for another book with that kind of influence, and it looks like the book you and your wife wrote might be it for our generation. I hope so.
5
Part of the dark side of the notion of the "American Dream" is the idea that if anyone can achieve greatness, anyone who does not has only themselves to blame, hence Ben Carson's callous attitude toward poverty. But this ignores the fact that, by definition, most people are not extraordinary, and therefore do not possess the unusual intelligence, talent or drive to overcome massive hardships and lack of access to resources. If we are to be a healthy society, one that is not constrained by poverty and inequality - such constraints limit the potential of society as a whole, and are detrimental to rich and poor alike - we need to base policy on what we consider to be a baseline standard of living for all of us. With adequate health care, education and reasonable welfare policies, people are able to maximize their potential, even if it is of the more ordinary kind.
6
Our very society depends on things we built through our governments, which also means the money we pay in taxes. The Internet? Created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to be able to communicate with various parts of the country after a nuclear strike against us. Computers? First built to determine artillery ballistics. The Interstate System of freeways? Authorized as part of the Defense authorizations in order to move military around in times of crisis. (The same with the US Highway system.) Many of the universities in our country, such as all the A&M universities, or the top public ones like UCLA, Berkeley, and such, depend on government spending. Social Security and Medicare, National Parks, Childhood education...
Most every dollar earned by the top companies in the US, in part, comes from the results of these publicly funded systems and institutions. Elizabeth Warren was spot on in her “You built a factory out there, good for you...” speech (from her 2012 run for the Senate; which, by the way, sure doesn’t sound Socialist to me).
So most often when one of us is successful, part of it comes from things we all contributed to. The same is true for the reverse, most often when one of us is unsuccessful, part of it comes from our collective failures.
3
When a person lives in an area, especially rural, where employment has departed for whatever reason, they are basically trapped. Their house is worth nothing because no one else wants to live there, they have no money to relocate or survive.
In the town I was born there was a company that produced trains and subway cars. During the WWII it had supplied millions of tons of armor plate and light tanks. It was the employer of choice because wages were higher. In 1960 the company decided to close that plant and move operations to another. Overnight the town changed. Property values dropped about 25%. Many men were looking for nonexistent jobs. It took the town years to recover.
People who have never lived in an area where poverty is rife have no idea how pressing and defeating it can be.
7
Does mr. Kristoff suppose the federal government is best suited to create jobs? Dangerous presumption, mr. kristoff, dangerous indeed.
2
@Dad W No, it is not dangerous, not in the least. This kind of rhetoric is exactly the problem. What is dangerous is capitalism run amok.
1
The federal government has created jobs in the past and can do so again. Or perhaps you prefer more poverty.
1
The individualism rooted in American culture will always be at odds with the simple reality that we are heavily influenced by the people we spend most time with, and at odds with the many hurdles in the way of social mobility like access to decent, tuition free education and universal healthcare.
I too was appalled by so many reactions blaming the victims to hide the ugly truth that they just don’t care, or at least not enough to pay more taxes for doing something about it.
6
Sorry to say but what happened to your friends is a harbinger of things to come. In the future There will be less investment in human capital with AI and robotics doing many jobs that employ many of us now. I’m not optimistic about the future.
4
Well put. Peter Maurin, co-founder (with Dorothy Day) of the Catholic Worker Movement in the 1930s had a nice line: we can't force people to be good; but we can work towards a society in which it's easier for people to be good.
14
All of what you say is true. Your despair is authentic. Your caring is genuine. Your moral and intellectual struggle over this is apparent. Hence, I could never ever take what you say lightly, or show even a hint of disrespect.
Now see this from where I am standing. I can no longer go to a public place without the stares and hateful speech, a sudden spurt of roughness toward my children and me, from the Trumpites. As immigrants, we stand out in sharp contrast. The further we venture from city center, the worse it gets.
The people of whom you write and speak is a circle that overlaps immensely with that of Trumpites. True, they got there for many reasons - I'll never know what or who caused that. But this diverse segment on which you are focused is united by one thing: they define immigrants from non-European nations as the key problem (among other things), and we are their easiest target. They are not alone, maybe not all of them, but chiefly them.
Clinically, I am moved. When placed in context of the choice of directing hate - I am not. I hope this clears it up for you.
7
Dear mr Kristof
This is an important piece that I hope is taken up outside of the op ed not just in this paper but in all. There are many causes to this issue. Certainly we can talk about the rhetoric of all gov is bad. We can include the short term thinking and selfish aims of politicians who abandon their constituents in favor of their job, corporations that abandon both their workers and the countries that nurtured them to success in favor of shareholder profits and a mean spirited social system that fosters a sense of instability and false competition in the public. To support this is a steady nurturing of individual responsibility that allows institutions to avoid any responsibility for public good. Instead of shared goals for the future we have politicians that divide by culture war outrage not unlike the regimes in the Middle East that whip up fervor against Israel or America to detract from failure to govern at home. Public discourse about what is important for this country to grow and prosper and public recognition for people who contribute to society instead of just being covered and famous for being rich is a good place to start the discussion of shared responsibility and shared prosperity
2
Thank you for your thoughtful and compassionate work, Mr. Kristof. Maybe those who are so quick to blame sufferers use that blame as a shield. It's a kind of hedge that lets them imagine that they're superior--and it's a signal of their own fear that if society made other choices, then they, too, could suffer. I've been amazed at the number of conservatives who spent previous decades blaming the unemployed for their plight but are now demanding the government change policies so that their industries--steel, coal, automobile manufacturing, some agriculture--will be protected.
When we study the costs of poverty in my government class and point out that government aid is less costly than letting the poor flounder, many of my students will still say that we should not give government aid because the poor don't deserve it. So many of them, of course, are going to school on grants, scholarships, and financial aid.
People are just afraid--afraid of scarcity and rejection. Science and compassion reduce both of those things, but so many of our political, economic, and religious 'leaders' depend on those fears to stay in power that here we are, shipwrecked on island of limitedness.
5
The narrative that holds people fully responsible for their fate in life is born out of emotional weakness. To think otherwise requires empathy and compassion, difficult emotions to shoulder. The compassion asked of us by Jesus Christ is unconditional and I need to frequently remind myself of that.
4
I have been a mental health nurse for the last 3 decades. Attributing deaths of despair to personal responsibilty is like attributing disease to the Greeks' Four Humours. Toxic stressors are at play in our rapidly changing world from absent safery networks, precarious employment, and widening income desparity. Failure to mitigate these stressors will accelerate deaths of despair.
21
Thank you for this insightful piece.
I find that often people do not understand how tough poverty is. Any challenge can quickly turn to disaster. To survive poverty requires meeting challenges by making very good — exceptionally good decisions — and having luck. For instance the car breaks and one needs to get a new one. A middle class family grumbles, gets a car and moves on. An upper class family doesn’t even grumble just gets a car. (By the way if an upper class family has to grumble society seems to call it “when bad things happen to good people”).
Anyway payments will equal 30% of Take home monthly income? What to do? May be luckily live near a bus route that’s only 6 blocks from my house and I’m healthy enough to walk to it. May be my family and friends have invested in social capital and developed very good social skills and have learned to pull together and I can get rides to work indefinitely. Or may be I just give up because I can’t afford a car so I can’t work and I can’t take it any more.
11
The problem is that successful people believe that their success is the product of their own industry. The conviction that my comfort is my reward for my effort avoids the reflection that similar effort by many other people leads to far different outcomes. Think of the battle field: twenty soldiers rush the building, five do not go home, did they not apply the same effort in their attack or their training?
The successful tend to lack humility, empathy and any sense that their good fortune might be accompanied by a duty to help others who fell behind.
8
From a person who has tried to live quietly and lift others up rather than put them down: New Year's eve all but shot my spirit out of the sky as my spouse informed me of a need to separate, and my older brother, who is losing the use of his legs after more then forty years of pain and surgeries suggested I prepare to learn that he has taken his life.
I think I can say with some authority that Mr. Kristof is on firm moral ground. At sixty-plus years of age, I possess enough insight to know that I have made many mistakes in life, but do know that I have worked hard, tried my best, and do not think that I have sinned so much that I should end up on the street. So, to those who wish to judge others so harshly as some have in response to his column, I say this:
Misfortune can strike any of us. And we may not see it coming.
26
My husband’s parents ate working class Holocaust survivors. My dad was a teacher, which means we had educated parents with a working class income.
My husband and I have succeeded through hard work, student loans, and sound personal choices— no drug or alcohol abuse, delaying parenthood until financially prepared, in my case going to law school in my 30’s when I had 2 small children. For the record, I had no burning desire to be a lawyer, just to find a stable job with a reasonable income.
None of our siblings is as successful, and I think that is also a result of poor choices including having children in insecure relationships and not pursuing higher education.
One of my nephews had real academic promise but his parents told him he could not go to college. He now works in a mine and has a son of his own.
I am at a loss as to why people with similar upbringing made such divergent choices. I have a tough time believing that in an information age, they could not have researched other options. My husband and I acted proactively (and made some financial decisions along the way). Our siblings seem only to react to problems as they arise.
I am sorry for their troubles, as well as the Knapps, but I still don’t understand why they veered off track. Someone asked me recently “don’t you ever just want to rebel?”. My answer: “Not nearly as much as I want to succeed”
10
Capitalism is about social stratification. The myth of the “self-made” individual perpetuates the cycle of blaming those who cannot function in modern society. After 4 generations of military servitude, I got the same choice my great-grandfather got: homelessness or enlistment. I chose the latter, becoming the “richest” person in my family. While giving my savings away to help support my impoverished family I watched as each of them rushed towards deaths of despair. My brother’s children were born addicted to opioids, my mom enabled him by stealing from me, my son became homeless after succumbing to mental illness, and I nearly became one of the “22” veterans who take their own lives each day. My family are victims of Capitalism and conservative abuse. Neither prayer, voting, nor any other kind of wishful thinking can change the systemic murder of this country’s forgotten poor.
9
Thank you for sharing your story. It’s important that we continue to puncture this cruel narrative. Please don’t give up—your life is worthwhile.
Thank you, Mr Kristoff, for your compassionate rejection of the “personal responsibility” narrative that is so prevalent. My dear friend, Theresa Clower, lost her son to opioid addiction in 2018. She has started a project, IntoLight.org, in which she has drawn the portraits of 41 people who were lost to drug addiction. This show was hung at Notre Dame University in Baltimore for a month, and then the portraits were gifted to the bereaved families. Theresa’s plan is to repeat this process, using artists who share her sensibility and renaissance style, in all fifty states and finally in DC where all 2000 portraits will be hung. Please visit her website at IntoLight.org and consider funding and supporting this worthwhile project.
2
This is THE argument I used to have with my dad. He served in WWII (for a few months, was never even shipped overseas), but for the rest of his life reaped incredible benefits such as a VA low-interest loan for a house, VA clinic access, etc. When I questioned him about why America couldn't offer universal health care or paid family leave, he always responded with "those people didn't earn those things like I did." I often find Nicholas Kristof's columns give me hope for this country, but I have to say, right now I'm close to giving up. My entire adult life we've been in the same loop: America is no closer today to offering a meaningful social safety net then it was 30 years ago. Sigh.
12
@Kathleen Mills
I, too, have to say that I'm very close to giving up on the USA. BUT, let's not give up too soon:
Vote in November!
9
I wonder if the people who judge so harshly have lost anyone they loved to deaths of despair, people they knew and cared about who were smart, good-hearted, talented, hard-working... Kindness costs nothing, in fact, its practice is infinitely rewarding to the one who offers it. The cost of cruelty, especially coming from those at the highest levels of government, and from people whose own lives are sheltered, is prohibitive.
9
What's so interesting about this piece is that Kristof is asking people to be more kind to others, simply because they are human beings. This is basically the message of Bernie Sanders' campaign.His policies are exactly the kind Kristof speaks of - policies designed to give everyone an opportunity to reach their potential. universal health care, education, jobs, and clean environment. There's no shaming or blaming, no "worthies" and "unworthies" --- everyone can have what they need to succeed. Of course, in order for that to happen, people need to pay their fair share. That's the part that people seem to have the most problem with. As Sanders' puts it, how much is too much when our very futures and lives are at stake? I think people should put Kristof's thoughts into action.
5
You're asking people, many of whom will purport themselves to be Christian, to put the precepts of Christianity into action. Would that that would happen. I have witnessed in many of my acquaintances that people are real good at talking the talk—but when it comes to walking the walk . . . ?
I think they're hedging their bets. They want others to think they believe . . . just in case it's true, but promises of an unproven being reigning over an unproven forever Wonderland is just a bit more than they can comprehend and so . . . they want their Wonderland now.
I don’t understand any of it. I'm not a Christian because so much of the myth-story is contradictory. But I do believe in Christ's teachings. I know that I feel a great sense of well-being when I do right by others. I feel good about myself when I help someone else. I aspire to be what Christ encouraged us to be. I don’t give up. I have enough. I don’t need more than that.
I enjoy life and see no reason for others not to have the opportunity to do the same. A big part of doing so is trying to not stand in their way, trying to understand that not everyone's wants and needs are the same as mine, and trying not to judge them . . . at least not too harshly.
It hurts to see others hurt. Is part that simply missing in some folks? Don’t they see hurt?
2
"we should worry less about intellectual property protections and more about investing in the well-being of young Americans."
But Mr. Kristof, why were you so quick to sneer at and dismiss presidential candidate Marianne WIlliamson, who is the only candidate who proposed a federal department of children and youth? She spoke often about how U.S. policies are traumatizing children. Seventy percent of her financial supporters were women, many of them mothers and grandmothers who care for children traumatized by our Race to the Top test score mentality. The dehumanizing way we do school, our "personal responsibility" narrative, and our obsession with competition, means children get the clear message that they don't matter. As Williamson said, children can't vote. WE need to look out for them.
4
Who set your horizons?
Was it always taken for granted by your parents that you’d somehow go to college, even if that meant no vacations or new cars, and possibly leave your home town for good? Did your friends from high school expect to go to college? Or did they go work 3rd shift at the local mill, buy a jacked up Dodge Superbee, and burn rubber up and down Main Street?
I’ve known families where one parent, often the mother, was determined that all the children would get a college education, and if that eventually meant the kids moved away for a better opportunity in life, so be it. I’ve also known parents like the Knapps who placed little or no value on education. Often those same parents discouraged their children from moving away. The differences in outcomes is stark.
Parents and childhood peers often set your life’s trajectory. Some of us are luckier than others in that regard.
13
I’m now about to reach my fifth decade and I can earnestly say that winning in life is mostly about luck. At birth, one can be born healthy and into opportunity or unhealthy and poor. So, at the very beginning, some have a big advantage. When a person interviews for a job, only one person can get it even if two candidates are equal in every quality. Some people are born smarter. We are not entirely self-made. It is my experience that most domestic violence and substance abuse situations contain a poor mental health component. So, while we can choose to better or worsen ourselves to some extent, we are largely constrained by our own faulty wiring and the choices of others.
10
The people in power have stopped working for the people who elected them and then started blaming those same people for their problems. It is the rhetoric you hear daily around the impeachment process. The problem isn't the bad actors it's the inadequacy of the people on the receiving end. We don't educate our children then wonder why they make poor decisions. We don't pay living wages and then wonder why people are homeless. I have had conversations with my retired friends about how the cost of living is higher and wages are not and they simply don't believe that. They put the blame on the young people failing to budget and cannot see the greed of corporate America. We need a change in optics. Maybe an art display all over America (like Newnan) about what the cost was [for groceries, utilities, housing, television, telephone, education] and what the wages were and what it is now. Maybe if it's in billboard size letters, it will get through.
5
There but for the grace of god, go I.
It's important to understand what makes people sink into despair. When you graduate from school but cannot find a job that pays your living expenses, when lose your job and can't find a job, where there is no path to a good job, despair sets in. Despair leads to self destructive behavior when there is no foreseeable future that holds the possibility of a decent living. Where there is no compassion despair is deepened.
There are many ways the government can help, but the simplest is for the government to create a large jobs program, where workers can earn a living wage and learn a trade. Teddy Roosevelt knew this, it's a lesson we need to learn again. The federal government should step up to create good jobs rebuilding our infrastructure, including technology skills, and teaching people needed skills in healthcare. It will help us all.
8
The political/economic assault on the working class began in earnest forty years ago and has been unrelenting. For example, it is quite simply unsustainable to routinely work three jobs to support a family. The psychological impact and the behavioral results we are witnessing are not accidents, or matters of "choice", but rather the natural and logical consequences of this situation. As in all social circumstances, it is pointless to chastise the character of the victims; to change outcomes it is the root causes which must be addressed. Furthermore, regardless of what one sees as proper motivation to take action, be assured our population as a whole will not escape both shame and increasingly negative consequences from the destruction of a large group of our people in this cruel fashion.
jd
2
As a public health researcher, one of the first lessons we teach is that some of the largest gains in Life expectancy I have been due to structural changes- changes in policy, and infrastructure- not changes in personal behavior. Sure ... behavior and personal responsibility matters but having a supportive environment is key. It was indoor plumbing, refrigeration, vaccines, air conditioning, and other changes to infrastructure that made a huge impact. We must not forget the role of government in making our environments safer places to live!
10
Let’s not be too quick to claim our achievements being solely powered by our will or blame ourselves for the lack achievements due to only our fault.
Unfortunately the vagaries of life can’t be explained by running a Monte Carlo simulation. Mr. Kristof and his Ivy League brand has served him well. I also recall reading an article of a homeless Yale grad recently (albeit he had a steeper slope to climb than Mr. Kristof).
1
“Gratuitous cruelty posturing as policy” is an apt description our president’s domestic agenda.
11
Poverty is a curable dis-ease that yes, limits choices..and often the 'choices' are for the least worse outcome of surviving to live a mean existence in an often dangerous circumstances. A broken bone can wipe out savings, imperil mortgage and rent payments and leave a family or a person homeless...for the simple lack of health insurance. The loss of a service job with its already meager wages quickly turns into homelessness when rent and utilities go unpaid. Every single action is harder, takes longer and even the most mundane decisions - buying tires for the car - can mean not eating or not paying water or electricity bills or not having transportation money for the week...which amounts to job loss.
Poverty means every decision can literally end in disaster: homelessness, illness, death. The SNAP - food stamps - program is being obliterated; there is no public health insurance for the 'able-bodied' that can't find work in states that refused to expand Medicare to the poor - and forget about going to a dentist if you're poor.
Poverty is a soul-crushing, death-defying scratch out existence that 15% of our country suffers under. Women and children are most often impoverished; the elderly whose income disallowed saving and the addicted or mentally and emotionally ill suffer - and die most often - from poverty.
There's a cure for the poverty disease - it's called MONEY but as a rich society, we've decided not to help.
8
Why does it have to be anyone's "fault"? What difference does it make? These are people who need help. The country is in a position to help them. I don't see what adding blame, in either direction, does to help us choose the right path.
7
The ‘better social narrative’ included in the last paragraph looks like just a bunch of platitudes. Hiding in there somewhere, apparently, is something about the ‘potential’ of our country. What might that be?
You see, something that religion is good at, and what a narrative without it will never be able to do, is binding together a group of people. All of the measures of well being that you can muster will never provide the meta strata of consciousness, awareness and identity that religion (the ‘lig’ in the word means ‘tie’, as in ligature) is so adept at providing. The problem with so called ‘secular’ narratives (isn’t everything secular, religion included?) is that they never reach the transcendent level that is needed to unite a large group of strangers. You even have pop philosophers like Alain d Botton trying to create ‘secular religions’ or to somehow borrow the unifying and hopeful aspect of religion without including the supernatural beliefs. In my opinion, you can’t do it. Why should I sacrifice to help that poor community? Because if I do I will see that their life expectancy at birth will rise 2.23%? Sorry, it is a worthy goal, but public health statistics are not sufficient to move me.
I read your first article with great interest and I’m stunned now to read the responses of your readers. My reaction was more along the lines of: there but for the grace of God go I. I grew up in a working class family in California and my aspiration as a child was to become a secretary. California’s long history (at the time) of massive investment in public education gave me the opportunity to go to a first-rate public university at virtually no cost to my parents where I was exposed to a world and opportunities far beyond what my family could ever have dreamed. With this educational foundation, I went to an Ivy League graduate school which set me up for a life and career in Washington. My friends, neighbors and colleagues here have very different backgrounds than I do and my children may not even fully understand our differences. Would this be possible now? I don’t know but I will forever be grateful to my home state and its taxpayers for the support i received in the first 25 years of my life.
19
Thank you again for this vital article.
One of the systemic pieces that's especially heavy on my mind in my own poor rural area is the lack of mental health care. I'm not a MH professional but volunteer for a group that often works with people in distress. I've seen kids who were on psychiatric medications with serious side effects, but who hadn't actually had a psychiatric evaluation because the waiting list for such evaluations was nearly a year long. I've tried to get help for a seriously depressed and sometimes self-harming person dealing with major trauma, and I've been given an immediate-emergency number to call but been told that the waiting list for regular counseling is at least four months long for non-Medicare patients and substantially longer for Medicare patients. Even when people are taking responsibility and trying to get help, it's very hard for them to find it.
In some cases people with addiction issues can jump the waiting list. I am *not* saying that people with addictions don't urgently need help, but I do think something about this system sets up a perverse incentive for people suffering mental illness to self-medicate, which only makes things worse.
6
It is clear to me that because of structural changes in the economy due to a plethora of internal and external factors that "making it in America" is not a task that can be borne by individuals. Without access to child care, health care, tuition remission and housing costs that are reasonably priced, no American can be expected NOT to struggle. A little struggle is good. It teaches resilience. But unrelenting struggle against a tsunami of forces that are out of an individual's control beget precisely what Mr. Kristoff is commenting on and will break even the most stalwart of wills. We can and must do better.
5
Everybody slips. Most of us fall at least once. The question is, who will help us get back up?
If you come from money your family will help you, until they won't.
Most of us don't come from money, and help can be very costly and hard to find.
In biology and medicine we judge the health of an organism by layers of redundancy to the essential mechanisms of life. Each layer helps absorb a blow - how many injuries or illnesses can one take before the underlying machinery of life is threatened? A healthy organism can take several insults; an unhealthy one may be on the edge after even a minor threat.
We have chosen to make our society an unhealthy organism. At this point the majority of us can be destroyed by an injury or illness, by addiction or even by an unplanned pregnancy. It need not be this way.
Thank you for a terrific and important piece of writing. I'm starting on the book.
10
I absolutely agree with what Mr. Kristof says here. We need to ask what is it in our society that has made so many turn to drugs? What makes these people so desperate? It is correct to examine economic policies that vastly favor one class over another. We all know if the minimum wage kept pace with inflation it would be closer to $22 an hour. Today that would mean you would have to work about 2 and half times as long to make that wage. But what I find more sinister about this is this attitude was the the very same perpetuated on Blacks since the Civil War. That they were where they were because they were deemed inferior. Unfortunately many came to believe what was said about them. I've included a link to an article that outlines this. This article could be applied to the greater population today.
https://theundefeated.com/features/if-you-truly-knew-what-the-n-word-meant-to-our-ancestors-youd-never-use-it/
2
I strongly suggest that your next column, book, or both focus on the resurgence of Social Darwinism in America. It began, not surprisingly, with the ascendance of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and accelerated when Limbaugh and Fox News provided the public trough on which hatred of the weak could feed. I never cease to be surprised by the vitriol directed at the millions left behind by our oligarchic form of capitalism. Worse is the increasing willingness to forgive, and even revise into victimhood, the abject cruelty practiced by persons of privilege. The Knapps were weak, but a wealthy teenager who kills without remorse is a victim of "affluenza." Social Darwinism has returned on steroids.
5
I applaud your compassion, Mr. Kristof - you get it. I agree the personal responsibility narrative is one that leads people to scorn the poor and working class, the unemployed, the addicted, and the mentally ill. Coupled with their disdain is a belief that we shouldn't spend money helping these people, that they don't deserve it, that it's a waste of money because it won't be used wisely or make a difference. What those who claim this fail to realize is the exponential cost of NOT helping. As a brief example, my college educated sister has a dual diagnosis - addiction and bipolar disorder - and has struggled for over 30 years to get adequate mental health care, housing, and employment. Her repeated incarcerations and hospitalizations (which have been so numerous her family has lost track of the number of times) have cost taxpayers millions of dollars at this point. I can't even say we, as a society, are penny wise and pound foolish because there is nothing wise about how we allocate resources (or refuse to allocate) to those who need help the most. I'd love for some organization to do a longitudinal study of how much a citizen like my sister costs "the system" over their lifetime in the absence of common sense and humane policies.
3
In this the privileged class and the many aspiring to belong to it have much in common. They have a deep seated contempt for the disadvantaged, the poor and the disabled regardless of political inclination or social construct. Not us cry the professional class liberals, we advocate for equality and are disdainful of no one. Yet their comments and opinions reek of class presumption and privilege. I say this as a working class liberal from flyover country who see’s an economic Darwinian argument in much of the criticism of Trumps economic supporters. Community is for our contemporaries not for the working masses. Think I’m exaggerating some? Look to Washtenaw country and the cities of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti Michigan. Ann Arbor likes to see itself as a “progressive” town while institutional poverty has existed nearby for generations. Talk about cost of living is clueless and guess who owns all that rental property? They’re owned by the progressives whose McMansion subdivisions are eating up nearby countryside and farmland while affordable housing options are few and far between. I expect indifference and dismissal from Darwinian economic and religious conservatives, it’s their foundational belief that to the powerful goes the spoils. What’s the professional class liberals excuse, I got mine Jack?
10
Parents make choices for children that the children have to live with for the rest of their lives. What kind of choices were made that allowed none of the five Knapp children to graduate from high school? Also, there was no mention of a father in the Knapp family story. The abrogation of parental responsibility is not the only reason for the disintegration of a family, but it surely is a large part of it.
9
What many people forget about kindness and charity and care, is that often the people who need care do not act nicely. One of the reasons people find themselves alone and without social support networks, is that by being jerks, they have alienated the support networks that might have helped them. And in becoming alienated, in accepting that they have to do things alone and pull themselves up, they also lose one of the most valuable features of social networks, honest and critical feedback. If you are able to never accept hard critique, you're not going to make needed change, and if that change is needed to become part of a robust network of trust and care, you become ever more isolated. This is the reason why we need institutionalized care systems independent of liking and choosing friends. Because we need as a group to care for people we don't like. This is also one of the key points often left out of reference to religious charity: when we care for others because God tells us to, rather than because they are "one of ours," as the story of the Good Samaritan tells us to, it makes it more possible to care for everyone. I'm not saying that we shouldn't also be building those social networks of mutual trust and care—helping our friends out is a lot of what makes us human animals tick. But not caring for the alienated, often unpleasant "other" is fuel for our breakdown as a large-scale society.
6
Mr Kristoff, I respect your opinions highly, but wonder why you use language (deliberately?) to cloud the issue.... Consider your sentence "My friends the Knapps made mistakes." Give people the dignity and freedom to make poor/wrong "choices," not just "mistakes." People under stress or demoralized often do not see (or remember) that there even IS a choice to make (or it just looks too impossibly hard to make a "better" choice). But a "bad choice" is still a choice. That said, I agree the it is the appropriate role of our government to help make those "right choices" also the "easy choice." It is also true that once a person has started down that slippery slope of an addiction, their capacity for "choosing" is progressively diminished. But as millions "in recovery" will attest, that capacity for better choices can be restored.
1
One thing--and perhaps the only thing--that has absolutely changed during the decades during which this country saw a rise in despair, addiction and mental health disorders in all economic sectors is a change in the American diet.
Because of factory farming, our diet lacks essential fatty acids. A push for low-fat (still very much mandated for school lunches) compounds the issue. The replacement of high fat snacks with sugary snacks, ditto.
The government has mandated that flour be fortified with essential nutrients. Salt contains iodine. Vitamin D is added to milk.
Perhaps school lunches can offer foods that are fortified with essential fatty acids for brain health. It could be offered so that parents can opt out.
It's hard to stand up to the pressures of life when your brain isn't functioning correctly.
3
Personal responsibility and community responsible are not mutually exclusive, but bi-directional. I would not pit one against the other. A well-functioning democracy requires that individuals work to the best of their abilities, acting in their own self interest with an awareness that it's in every individual's self interest to ensure that the whole community is protected and cared for.
3
There's no simple answer to the question raised in your headline, Mr. Kristof. My daughter lives with her husband and three children on a 22-acre farm not far from Yamhill. It's a beautiful part of Oregon's Willamette Valley with rolling hills, vineyards and hickory groves. The kids are happy, intelligent, well-adjusted and well-schooled. The parents and their circle of friends are successful professionals, satisfied in their careers and certainly not sunk in despair. I'm sure some among their neighbors are less fortunate, either because of bad choices or simply victims of circumstance beyond their control. They need help, but our country has some very bad political leaders who deny them that help. One of our two major political parties is determined to get rid of the social safety net, creating a dog-eat-dog society where only the rich survive.
5
Well said Mr. Kristof- The US is blinded by the heroic myth of personal responsibility and going it alone. The lone cowboy or cowgirl who rides into town and singularly fixes all problems. It’s a myth. Look at FDR’s initiatives pulling the US out of the depression, the “allies” during the Second World War. We are stronger together- as many countries around the world prove day after day.
3
Despair. Although a family may love and care abundantly, if they too are despairing, and if the nation itself does not value human life, it’s just not enough.
1
Things HAVE changed. Improved transportation and communications have allowed businesses to offshore jobs, impoverishing many Americans and American communities. But things have always been hard. (Have you read Grapes of Wrath?)
In your previous column I believe you said none of the Knapps finished High School. And their disastrous lifestyle choices were too numerous to need another mention.
They needed interventions.
They apparently weren't as "smart and talented" as you thought they were.
But that didn't make them "bad," and it shouldn't have doomed them to early deaths.
We, as a society, need to quickly, at a young age, identify the youngsters who can't quite function in our system, and see that they get the lifelong supervision and counseling they need.
Black or white, native or immigrant, some people just can't make it on their own, and we should help them.
3
The issue with the "personal responsibility" philosophy in the USA is that if people really really believed in it, there should be no inheritance. Everybody should start from zero. But no, this philosophy is only applied to poor people. The rich can have millions of dollars of advantage to start with, without any personal responsibility for it, just an inheritance, and that's not seen as a competitive advantage over everybody else. It's a fake philosphy, applied at discretion.
22
Thank you for this.
In the USA, individuals are considered as independent and free. This powerful myth has benefits - it creates a strong drive for everybody to overcome the odds and succeed, instead of blaming their problems on unfair circumstances. It stops them from wallowing in fruitless self-pity or destructive jealousy.
But it also has a major drawback: it's a myth, and because this myth is so prevalent, it makes reality invisible. Major corporations, for instance in the food industry or the pharmaceutical industry, are preying on american people with enormous consequences. 70% of adults and 1/3 of children are overweight or obese, mainly because they've been addicted to sugar by food giants. Half a million young americans have died in the opioid crisis, mainly because they've been addicted to opioids by pharmaceutical giants. In countless other essential areas of life, from social media to environmental protection to healthcare, American society pits isolated individuals against giant organizations that benefit from manipulating them, stealing from them, and often killing them.
And all of this is justified by the myth that an individual is all-powerful to control his or her own behavior - that the heart attack victim can pick a different hospital to avoid abusive fees, that the insecure teenager should be mature enough to get off instagram, etc.
This flies in the face of common sense. But Americans continue to believe it, even as it kills their family or friends.
8
A thousand times yes. With FDR and the New Deal we had a progressive tax system that paid for investments in science, education, infrastructure and human welfare. Now we invest in billionaires.
14
I couldn’t agree more with Mr Kristof’s points. I grew up on a farm in South Dakota, and see the exact same casualties in my relatives and people I grew up with - young people in my family trying to farm where the economics are rigged toward huge corporate farms, drug availability everywhere and people’s dark jokes about people being killed “baking meth,” and a stubborn ethos of conservatism that perpetuates the GOP having a stranglehold on the politics. It’s scary to me where we’re headed as a country.
6
It only shows the wealth of America doesn’t bring happiness. We are educated to pursue money not meaningful lives. When we live like we are a part of nature we will be fine. When we don’t, and live like we have “dominion” over nature, we become a problem not only to other life but also to ourselves. When a person can’t stand their own existence, they end it. It is tragic.
1
On the flip side of this, there is the belief held by (mostly) middle and upper-middle class white Americans that everything they have, they deserve. Everything they have is because they are intelligent, hard working and disciplined.
One acquaintance offers a good example: born and raised in an upper middle class neighborhood on the East coast by parents who were college professors, she has achieved material success by most standards (although still not enough by hers). A white woman and ostensibly liberal, she nonetheless misses few opportunities to point out the "injustices" of affirmative action, or rather her perception that most successful African-Americans (for instance) are so because of preferences and "political correctness." Obviously forgetting that the main beneficiaries of affirmative action for the past few decades have been middle class white women, she believes SHE deserves every ounce of her success, whereas others do not.
HER children will be smart enough to get into an elite college, only to be stymied if someone "less smart" is given preference. Obviously forgetting that she (and her parents) will have spent well over $1,000,000 in school fees and other assistance so that her smart children could attend the right college.
I do not believe that affluent Americans should feel guilt for their achievements, no matter how undeserved, but a smidgen of humility, gratitude for circumstances and compassion for others would be refreshing.
12
I once read, I believe in The Times, that a middle class child had heard millions more vocabulary words by pre school than a child living in poverty had. The middle class children already had a leg up on the use of words that was hard to ever make up. They also had books in their homes, adults reading to them, trips to children’s museums, zoos, plays, etc. We think of poverty in terms of money, but it’s also about the poverty of experience. This kind of poverty impacts a child’s life in profound ways. In my own state, which is poor, 60% of adults can’t read above the 6th grade level. Their economic options are limited as is their ability to raise their children out of poverty. Blaming the poor for their lot in life is the easy route. You can’t pull yourself up by your boot straps if you have no boots to put on. In the richest nation in the world we can change that picture so the poorest among us have options beyond drugs, dead end jobs, and despair.
14
Thank you Mr. Kristof, for putting the underlying history and social thought that has brought us to the precarious state of families and decreased stability .... so clearly and so personally.
Please keep reminding us that change must start with ‘us’. E pluribus unum. We desperately need this conversation to continue into the next election.
3
Extremely well said, Mr. Kristoff. Very poor people lead very fragile lives. One small mistake, one misfortune, can spell the difference between entry into the middle class on the one hand, or abject poverty and homelessness on the other. We should worry less about whether some "undeserving" poor person is gaming the system, and more about whether we are providing a sufficient safety net and "social/economic ladder" (public schools, libraries, public transportation etc) so that people can climb out of poverty with a reasonable amount of effort.
9
"When we as a nation are willing to pay extra so that we can lock people up and rip apart their families, that’s gratuitous cruelty posturing as policy."
And that is why, when the GOP takes over, I make an extra effort to reduce our taxes--we don't want to support their cruelty. When Dems are in power, we know our tax dollars are much more likely to be used in ways that benefit young children who have their WHOLE lives ahead of them. We all, as a part of society, are partly to blame for your friends' deaths. Thank you, Mr. Kristof.
3
Let's not lose sight of the greatest problem here- the opiod epidemic and shortage of mental health care. In the first Kristof article, even the talented, gainfully employed granddaughter fell victim to drug addiction and some of the kids started with drugs as young as 12. There is often an underlying mental illness that leads people to self-medicate. Unfortunately, even in my home state of affluent, liberal Massachusetts, there are not enough qualified psychopharmacologists for the indigent. I am a physician in a mixed-income area and when we try to refer seriously mentally ill patients on Medicaid/Masshealth for psych management, services with even paraprofessionals and NPs have months long waits all the while these patients roam the streets self-medicating until their problems become more recalcitrant. Even after they have their appointments, the treatment plans by inadequately-trained practitioners are not sophisticated enough and prescriber turnover is too high for proper continuity of care. It is more cost-effective for our country to invest in mental health care than trying to "put scrambled eggs back in the shells" later with increased costs for prisons, drug rehabs, homelessness on the streets. It could start by training more psychiatrists and therapists and compensate them better esp those who work in clinics for the indigent.
12
Very important information from the front lines. Lack of psychiatrists especially with knowledge of addiction is a countrywide problem. Many here in Bay Area will only work for direct pay from patient.
One thing this article made clear was that there is a certain group of people who lack any kind of empathy for their fellow man. Whether they are quick to judge or can’t see how the struggles of others through a depression may be beyond recrimination. The number of people in this group seems to be growing. Empathy is a learned behavior but it needs to be reinforced at an early age.
22
These people are called republicans and they are currently destroying our country.
1
This is a nearly perfect essay on the deleterious effects of the social Darwinism and rampant Calvinism so gratuitously marbled throughout the collective unconscious of the United States today. Poverty leads to trauma. Trauma leads to self blame. Shame and a dysregulated stress response system lead to self medication to soothe the untreated, unresolved trauma. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) of the kind discovered by Dr. Nicholas Felitti, chief of Kaiser Permanente’s revolutionary Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, CA, diminish the quality and longevity of life among afflicted individuals. These ACEs are concentrated more heavily among the poor.
What will save these people is not "moral grace" as Kristoff explains since grace means "unmerited favor" - as if these folks don't deserve a fair chance in life. What this country needs is not moral grace, but moral clarity about whom we devalue from the get go, how that crushes hope and health, and that reducing inequality is the surest way to reduce "deaths of despair'.
14
Help the children is correct. But what about the parent(s) of those children? Must we not help them as much so that they can give a stable launching pad for their children. There is plenty more we can do.
12
The answers are complex - and not everything need divide us - but every one starts with more compassion. Thank you for helping to soften all our hearts.
7
My wife is from another country and one thing she noticed in the US is how individualistic we are as a culture. You are on your own, that is basically how we view our country.
“Anyone can make it here” is our mantra. So if you do not make it, it is your own fault for being weak or not trying. I call it “Make it or die Capitalism”.
I wish we could find a better way to live and support each other as a culture and country.
10
Completely ignoring the role of disadvantageous trade deals, onerous regulations and willfully negligent immigration policies that have distorted the jobs working class American citizens once did.
Access to healthcare and welfare doesn’t soothe job losses and wage destruction. And how does one take ‘personal responsibility when our governing class has time again encouraged and enabled policies that destroy opportunity or favor others?
1
@CNNNNC
Huh? Which regulations are actually "onerous"? Are you suggesting we eliminate rules that protect people? I suppose we could return to the pre-70s when people were regularly mangled in auto wrecks, the Hudson had indeterminant foam on top and you couldn't see the skyline in LA.
Reagan falsely made "regulations" a boogeyman, one of his many legacies we're wrestling with today.
3
Bravo. The criminalization of addiction has been a blight on our nation, mostly affecting the poor and people of color and reinforcing the cycle of poverty. I am solidly middle class, but my own struggle with addiction has extracted a price I could ill afford, no small part in legal fines and fees. My own addiction was the result of a trifecta of environment, genetics (a family full of addicts) and bad choices. As a former high school teacher, I also saw this problem tearing up families on both ends of the income spectrum. Contrary to most what republicans seem to think, that we spend too much as a nation on schools, we need to pour more into them to make them centers of refuge and counseling as one counter to this deadly facet of our national life.
8
When I volunteered to do some supportive work in a prison facility I learned what can be at the root of so much of the viciousness of the "it's personal responsibility" attitude. People have absolutely no clue what it is like to live a life very different from their own, where they have no control over the social forces that shape their lives from birth. And they want to reinforce their own delusion that all lives are alike through cruel views of other people.
7
Yes, we are a society first. No newborn raised himself.
We are responsible for each other. That responsibility includes, however, being responsible for ourselves as well. Nobody gets off easy in this.
Some, however, have it worse at the beginning than others. Only good policies can help.
2
Part of the problem (there are many parts of the problem) is the massive gulf between society’s “elite” and the lower classes. Urban professionals and the cultural elite might as well live in a different universe than the Knapps. Personal responsibility is a good thing, but people need realistic role models to avoid the galaxy of destructive temptations this world throws at us. Our current elite are not good role models.
3
Yes, Mr. Kristof it’s all very sad but identifying a problem and saying we should all be nicer isn’t an answer. Capitalism is always evolving, always looking to decrease costs and increase profits. If that means off shoring manufacturing and moving to technologies that employ fewer people so be it. If the insecure workforce is offered credit for survival rather than well paid employment so be it. If drug companies offer narcotics to dull the pain - narcotics that a black street vendor would go to prison for selling - so be it. If education, medical care, food, housing are commodified so be it. More Medicaid money ain’t gonna cut it. Even if the government wanted to do anything about it, and they don’t, they can’t control business. It’s the system, baby.
2
My retired parents were available for childcare assistance so my husband and I could both work. Free childcare is a pipe-dream for most Americans. One aspect of this was that I married a bit later and had children in my mid to late thirties, meaning that my parents were therefore in their retirement years, willing and available.
Houses were affordable in our neighborhood. We got a mortgage we could handle and are still in the same house, although if we didn’t already own it we couldn’t afford it due to absurdly spiraling real estate values. With childcare and a home squared away, we had excellent healthcare coverage through our NYC teaching jobs. Tick, tick, tick - the three hugest issues were settled.
Because we had childcare, a home and healthcare, we could save for college, and devote ourselves to shepherding our children through the minefields of adolescence. We did this by relentlessly supervising them and filling their days with activities, which we could afford due to free childcare and free healthcare. They worked from 7:30am until 5:00pm every day every summer at a day camp.
It frightens me to look back and imagine how we ever could have done it without free childcare, job-related healthcare and affordable housing. While we and the kids worked our butts off, I acknowledge our advantages and luck. Childcare, healthcare and housing are human rights that should not depend on good luck. My own sister lived too far away for my parents to help with her kids.
11
And several keys to your successes are you waited for a family, your parents supported your goals and you took responsibility at home to make sure that your children saw your example and learned how to learn. I doubt that this Knapp family did any of that from the parents through the raising of their children. I am not sure if I can blame them for what they did not know to do but wonder what public institution did not teach them how to use what they had effectively. Thanks
I am in a unique position I have never spoken of before.
I'm the middle sibling of 3 girls born about 1 year apart.
the youngest is very wealthy and has that oh too bad attitude towards anyone who does not succeed. She has no tolerance whatsoever towards anyone who has hard luck.
My older sister became addicted to opioids for about a decade of her life. She has lifelong chronic depression and I think that is in part why she became addicted. She has a very sad life now--no money in savings and struggles every single day.
I'm in the middle; I am single and have to live a pretty frugal life to make the ends meet. But I think I am better off than most people.
Recently over Christmas my older sister's family had a crisis.
I dug into my savings to help them financially.
The younger wealthy sister sent my oldest sister and crying emoji with one word when she asked her for help-sorry
sorry--I don't think she has ever helped my sister once.
Her attitude is hard for me to understand.
A family in crisis and you get a crying emoji with the word sorry next to it. Just to clarify my older sister has never received or asked for help before.
14
Find and replicate successful public school and trade school programs instead of predatory DeVos-style school loans; fund healthy families, instead of Trump axeing access to healthcare, birth control (and cutting food stamps right before Christmas!); regulate pharmaceutical opioid distribution instead of maximizing profits over lives, and institute treatment and rehab over draconian for-profit mass incarceration.
The deaths in the Knapp family - and thousands upon thousands of other losses- show us it's worth doing right.
12
The mechanism of evolution highlighted by Darwin was the inculcation of a competitive advantage in increasing reproduction of those members of a species with a unique characteristic which was passed on to their heirs.
Social Darwinism ignores this reproduction thing. We give just enough help to let the poor reproduce, even enabling easier reproduction by limiting access of the poor to contraceptive services. This half-hearted support only serves to increase the numbers of the poor and marginalized further driving the wedge between the precariat and the privileged.
The plutocrats drive the bus to bring their workers to the edge of the abyss and then close the plants when they can save a dollar by outsourcing. It is as if they emptied the bus and blindfolded the workers and blithely drove away in search for others to use up and discard.
This is not Darwinism of any kind. It is slavery, cruelty and abandonment. It is greed.
13
“What would a better social narrative look like? It would acknowledge personal responsibility but also our collective social responsibility — especially to help children. It would be infused with empathy and a “morality of grace” that is less about pointing fingers and more about offering helping hands. It would accept that a country cannot reach its potential when so many of its citizens are not achieving theirs.”
Thank you Mr. Krystoff
6
Back in 1970 there was a down turn in the computer field with many people out of work. My husband was one of them. He had a little over a years’ experience as trainee programmer but no college degree. He was also in all honesty over paid, something his friends pointed out. When he went for interviews he was told that 1 he needed a degree and 2 he would be starting at less than what he had been making. He was furious and refused to consider any less than what he had had before. It took several months, a separation and a number of his friends and former coworkers to get him to deal with reality. He went back to college on the GI bill and took a job that he had felt was beneath him. Would like to say that everything went well after that but with the chip on his shoulder and his feeling of entitlement things were anything but smooth This is something that I have observed in many people having lived with it. I fear that you will find this problem everywhere whether it is the Weirmar Republic or 2020 USA.
5
“ We moved from an inclusive capitalism in the postwar era to a rigged system...” Too true. But here is where the GOP has succeeded in its message: you won’t be able to succeed unless you join us in keeping others down.
The arguments that you failed to make: (i) vast wealth is a form of hoarding it is a mental condition and (ii) all that hoarded money is money you weren’t paid, (iii) anonymous corporate ownership allows people to both act badly and has the advantage of immortality. The wealth of this country’s family offices (a monarchy in all but title) is exactly why we broke off from England. The GOP and tea partiers have you focused on the taxes but the point wasn’t the taxes it was the system the taxes were feeding. There were taxes in the new US country, there wasn’t a monarchy.
7
It simply is not accurate to say, as Kristoff does here, that the narrative the blames poverty and addiction on its victims' "weak character" has "gained ground" in the last fifty years. There has always been a strong streak of individualism in American life, particularly in the South, and a concomitant belief in the primacy of personal agency; if anything, the whole trend of sociology and psychology in the latter half of the 20th century has run in the opposite direction—that our lives are largely determined at birth, by genes and environment. As others have commented, Kristof is a compassionate writer—but he almost always gets an important aspect of the problem or solution wrong.
4
This disparity in Americans' well-being is all about economics, but not in the conventional sense. It's another form of the economics of war: and war is always cheaper than peace. War is used to solve differences between parties who won't invest in the high costs of peace. Costs such as building trust, doing the hard work of negotiations, reaching for human commonalities rather than reverting to tribal differences. The costs of recognizing and addressing American shortcomings are just too high for the entitled American public. Why invest in the complexity and demands of change when it is easier, though more expensive, to maintain the status quo and attribute our societal flaws to others' shortcomings?
4
It's both. They have failed themselves by making bad choices, but our capitalist society has failed them by making them seems as failures in a winner take all economy. The answer is social democracy: from each according to their ability, to each according to his need.
6
The Chinese are trying to deal with the weak or flawed "character" issue buy using technology to establish what basically amounts to a point system for "good behavior" (as defined by the Party, which sees political opposition among other things as a manifestation of a flawed character). It offers a broad-based incentive program for people to "make the right choices." Is that our future here? A Pavlovian reward system paid for by tax dollars so that more people will "make the right choices?"
3
People would make better choices if they had better options. The menu of life choices is different for everybody.
Ordering Pie for dinner does not mean you want to be unhealthy, sometimes its the only thing you can stomach. With little exception Nobody volunteers to be an addict or suffer the fate of the Knapp siblings willingly and with full knowledge of the likely outcome. These lives lost to Society's ills are self inflicted by the Society who refuses to honor, care and show respect for itself--and NOT by the victims of the system that allows choosing completely normalized and readily available options of self destruction.
4
I agree with all this, and I'll continue to advocate for humanist policies that equalize opportunity. There is one thing that Mr. Kristoff neglects to mention, however: most of these people vote for Republicans. That's where my sympathy stops.
8
We see the consequences of our decisions. The notion that if you force people to be more responsible they will is an interesting one. Take away a family's food stamps and , poof, they will be forced to work several jobs and make ends meet. Problem solved. Or if we give wealthy people more money, others will benefit and middle class existence will be reborn. Happy days WILL be here again. Except.....the economy is not linear with an ever rising slope. And the line is not the same for all income groups. Eventually the economy will slow, hiring will stop, layoffs will begin, and incomes will stagnate and decline. Those whose eyeballs were just breaking the water's surface will , once again, find themselves under water. Does anyone think the first group that will be impacted will be the rich? So if this is the greatest economy in decades and the despair is this high, just imagine what will happen when the economy declines and the safety net has been dismantled. Only one thing you have to understand that explains all this: There is no money to be made in psychiatry. Psoriasis , on the other hand.....
5
Excellent points. It's not always useful to compare what we supposedly had long ago with what we see today. In the past, the pie was large enough to share with all. In particular, in the industrial surge after WW2, labor was essential for profitability, and labor was cherished. As other nations developed their industrial engines, America was no longer king of the manufacturing hill, especially in steel. With the fall of the USSR, the world was the oyster of American capitalists, and American labor became disposable. The new world and the new economy began to pinch American workers, while commentators like Pikety showed that the rich just went on getting richer. Human nature doesn't change. It just dons a cloak---or discards it. The racism we see today is not by any means new. The religious bigotry we see today is as fresh as if newly imported by Calvinistic Scots Irish. America has always had two sides, light and dark. They have competed over the decades. Today, the dark side is more dominant, and despair finds nests in hearts and minds ill-prepared by their limited, utilitarian education. Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump?
3
The arguments you do not like are the very arguments your fellow party members make.
Keep that in mind when you vote for Trump, either by commission or, if you can’t stand to do that, by omission when you do not vote for the Democrat. Which I suspect you won’t either.
Thank you for this excellent column. I think the personal responsibility issue is a hubris that we often use to avoid our inherent social responsibility. Glorification of the individual over the whole can only lead to a breakdown of the whole, and that is indeed what we are seeing today. We can see this trend officially promoted even in our currency. The motto on our bills has changed from the socially empowering E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one) to the rather socially disempowering In God We Trust, which clearly puts the onus of social outcomes on an external God.
3
Those who are so quick to be judgemental of the poor, should be careful. It can be a quick downward spiral, literally to the street, in this country.
As a nurse working in a community program for the uninsured from 2008 to 2015, I worked with many clients who lost employment, health insurance and sometimes housing through no fault of their own during the recession. Faced with the limited patchwork of charity and public assistance available, a common refrain was "Is this all there is after I've worked all my life?".
Treatment options for addiction and behavioral health are far and few between, especially for the uninsured. And it still makes me angry about the "education" we were given in the 90s by the pharmaceutical industry about pain being the fifth vital sign and how non-addictive their new opiod products were.
10
My wife and I live comfortably in a nice neighborhood in the suburbs. Our home, fully paid for, is valued at about $400 thousand. Together our 401ks have over $1 million. We have pretty good health insurance which, thankfully, has covered the vast majority of our medical bills over the years. In addition to the 401k, we both have decent pensions from our jobs and collect additional income from social security. Of course things could change on a dime, especially if one of us suffers a medical crisis that even our insurance won’t cover, or when the markets go south. But today, life is good. We made good choices.
But here is the thing. Our American dream has been directly aided by policies designed decades ago to help folks like us build wealth. We studied, went to college (with scholarships) and worked hard, but we clearly and directly benefited from policies that guaranteed and subsidized our 401ks, pensions, and social security, mortgage, and health insurance, keeping money in our pockets and helping us invest to earn more. The money taxpayers spent on us helped us, over time, to directly accumulate wealth. We have never been stigmatized as “welfare” recipients.
Now, why don’t we stop attacking one another and apply similar policies, tailored for today’s challenges, more broadly, so everyone benefits like we, and millions of other fortunate ones, already have? Id gladly pay more in taxes to help out.
68
@Bryan If more people in your position could be as honest as you have in assessing your situation, it would be very helpful to our national dialogue. Kudos to you for the good choices and long-term view you and your wife seem to have taken, but especially for your awareness that your ability to do that stemmed in part from public policy decisions that made that planning possible. If more people could be honest, and not defensive, about their situations, it might be harder for politicans to divide us!
6
What are sensible compassionate suggestions? What does one do when a family member refuses to follow through with treatment offered continually, and continues the deception and thefts and brings resulting jeopardy and deleterious effects to all in the family?
9
Not their fault that this has become a third world country. This country has abandoned its people, its animals, its environment, its civil rights movement. The 21st century has been a disaster, as millions of innocents have died in our wars overseas - the resources we blew away on invasions could have been used to help our own people. We have allowed Monsanto to poison our crops, capitalists to steal our homes, our savings, our tax money, and our jobs. The police and politicians who are supposed to help us, are killing us. I just don't understand why more poor and working class people aren't marching in the streets together, against the government. Maybe it's the same old racist "divide and conquer," but deep down it feels to me like anyone who isn't rich is having a lot of the same problems. You could read this together with The New Jim Crow or Men We Reaped to see how vast the problems are in this country. The only difference is that now more white people are having the same problems that African-Americans and Native Americans have had for a long time: marginalization, violence, poverty, and lack of opportunities.
11
Thank you for this column and the earlier one that drew attention to the "deaths of despair" in many forgotten and abandoned corners of America. We do indeed need a "morality of grace" and a public theology of the value of all people. And we need to implement state and federal programs--using lots of taxpayer dollars--that support and invest in our citizens. There is nothing fiscally or morally responsible about locking people up and/or allowing them to overdose for lack of the will and commitment to include them in civic society.
4
I would like to understand at a granular level the actual roots of American despair as ascribed to the Knapps as being representative of many in our country. To attack a problem realistically, it really needs to be understood.
Although it would be a major shift in our country, we CAN provide more money to the vast majority of Americans. I think this would help so we should do it. A simple re-read of Andrew Yang's recent NYT interview is most illuminating and helped me understand why a growing number of people will be left behind as time proceeds as is.
On the personal responsibility side, I see two main things: A drive for education/trade/technical skill attainment, and a need for fathers to stay with their families, even if not in a married situation.
On issues of drug rehab, because of the size of the problem, I feel that some sort of AI/technology driven solution needs to come into play; not in isolation but as an integral component. Even with funding, we don't have the number of people available or the manual systems to handle it.
And yes, long prison sentences for non-violent offenders doesn't make sense to me either.
5
Education for humaneness, for recognition of one's responsibilities for other people, should begin in government funded pre-schools. Part of every day, even a few minutes, must be devoted to having children think and say how each child can help another child who needs that help. This must be part of every day all through school, so that it is experienced as normal and normative. We must learn that help for those in need is not a matter of "grace" as Mr. Kristof offers, but of duty. Only a deontological ethics will get us out of this death spiral.
5
Re "Over the last half-century, this narrative has gained ground in America; it’s an echo of the 'social Darwinism' that circulated a century ago."
Many will disagree, but I would argue that the purported opposite of social Darwinism, Christianity, is at the root of many people's harsh judgments toward those they find inferior to themselves.
One of the ingenious innovations (or at least, popularizations) of the Christian faith is its emphasis on individual culpability, as opposed to group identity, ritual and so on ("There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." - Galatians 3:28.)
And yet, this same sense of individuality makes many (though far from all) Christians, particularly American Christians steeped in myths of rugged individuality, take such a cruel view of those less fortunate than themselves. In essence, such people believe that everything that happens is a reflection of their deity's pleasure or displeasure, and therefore, those who suffer must be responsible for their suffering.
This attitude reaches its nadir in the "prosperity gospel," the idea that god rewards *true* believers not just in the afterlife, but also right here and now.
The caveat to all the above is that on balance, the message of Jesus seems to be one of caring for "the least of these." But in hyper-individual America, that interpretation is not accepted by many of the most vocal Christians.
8
@CB Evans
I also think that the tithing practice of Churches means that congregations already consider they have "done their bit" towards reaching out to those in need. And if a churchmember is in distress, there are fundraisers within the church to assist them. I wonder if the tithing replaces the belief in the social services safety net, and the wish to contribute to same by increased taxes.
3
I "blame" everything on our victory in ww2. Most people I know (may my family) lived a middle/upper/lower middle class life in the 60s(I was a child) working in factories, grocery stores in union jobs and we could afford it as our competition(Japan, Germany) were rebuilding from the war and countries like India and China were barely on our radar. We had pensions, health care, etc because we could set the price of products. The Vietnam war gave us in Conn(not my family but others I know) 10 years of prosperity building helicopters and tanks. Now that is gone but a generation(luckily not me as my father said he had no connections so I had to study) received a slapdash education knowing they had a place to work(add phone co, post office, rail, insurance) regardless of what they knew. That died in the mid 80s and I think now we are more serious about education but a whole generation of disgruntled people are out there confused as to why they can't live as well as their parents.
6
Thank you for your essays, Mr. Kristof. It’s easy to sit in judgement of others just looking at the situation on the surface. Dig just a bit into someone’s misfortune and, in my experience, there is a treasure trove of trauma. Sexual abuse, PTSD, injuries that have driven the person to pain killers, etc. Each of these things takes dedicated work to recover from...oh, and expensive therapy. Let’s not judge people who don’t have the resources to get the help and ongoing support they need. Judgement isn’t a cure. It’s wasteful and ultimately harmful. Instead, let’s make sure trauma victims can get the therapy they need to move beyond the event. And yes, it can be a long process (years). This is why we all need reliable, accessible health care.
4
We understand that there are quite a few “conservatives” who dismiss the compassion argument out of hand. Yet as the article points out, we’re paying extra ( a lot extra) to lock people up instead of offering them drug treatment. We’re paying extra for uninsured & underinsured people to use the ER as their GP because they have no alternatives. We’re paying extra when someone winds up in the hospital with a diabetic crisis because they can’t afford insulin or preventative care. Set aside for the moment that basic decency demands that we try to take better care of people. Even the coldest hearted elements of the “bootstraps” crowd should be forced to wake up and acknowledge that this is utterly insane from a cost perspective.
4
The U.S., by choice, moved from F.D.R.'s New Deal to Reagan's trickle-down, supply side economics.
One economic system supported workers to offer them substantial bargaining power against corporations. The other gutted labor to shift all the power, all of it, to corporations.
One economic system taxed the wealthy and corporations at a rate which would benefit our schools, infrastructure, medical care and social safety nets. The other slashed taxes on the wealthy and corporations and placed the burden of funding government on the middle-class and then declared there is no money for schools, infrastructure, medical care and social safety nets.
One economic system kicked fiscal spending into high gear when the global economy tanked to ensure workers had jobs and could continue to support their families. The other started two wars while cutting taxes and expanding Medicare Part D, all by increasing our national debt, which places the financial burden of paying for these follies on future generations.
One economic system invests federal monies into science and research to financially support innovations. The other invests federal monies in protecting religious organizations to ensure the primacy of intolerance, misogyny, racism and delusion.
This was and remains the choice of the U.S. voters.
7
Loved the first article and this one too. Compassion is key. I was once helped selflessly by two people that weren't even family and that made all the difference. Let's try to do that for someone in our community as often as we can. Let's fight for everyone's right to have the tools they need to lead fulfilling and healthy lives. Let's be open to helping even if we might not understand. Thanks again for your article.
3
I agree with the need for more investment in people and an expanded social safety net. I do have trouble with what I would call the "economic determinism" explanation of our addiction problem. So many kids start getting hooked on drugs because they begin using substances and alcohol at parties as teenagers, long before they ever enter the job market. We have to acknowledge that our addiction problem has cultural and economic roots and possibly biological sources as well. My oldest cousin died of an opioid overdose in 1999. His younger brother leads a stable middle-class life with his two daughters both in college. They grew up poor, under much worse circumstances than you describe for the Knapps. I don't think we'll ever really understand why my older cousin died - economic arguments don't really come close to capturing all that was going wrong in my cousin's life.
6
In 1986-69 I was part of the Future Teachers Club at my Catholic, suburban high school outside of Detroit. Each Saturday we were bused to downtown Detroit to tutor children from the Detroit public schools. The children were fed a breakfast, then met with us for an hour or so of tutoring. I still remember the conditions of the school...dark, dreary, worn down. I learned that the students were not able to take books home to study, like I was, and indeed had to share books while in school. How they were doing any homework I will never know. I compared what I saw with the beautiful, gleaming school I attended, with language labs and every possible resource. I didn’t give these inequities much thought at the time...after all, I was a 14-year-old. Once I got to college, however, and started studying child psychology, it occurred to me that these students would have a significantly harder time competing with me in school and perhaps beyond, not because they were any less intelligent, but because they started at a different point, and would always be playing catch up. I have never forgotten that experience. Kristof is right. Our system is broken. We need to minimize the ‘luck’ factor, and provide a more level playing field to our children.
10
I suggest people who ascribe to the character flaw theory of drug addiction read "Chasing the Scream" by Johann Hari. He makes a strong, evidence based case for an alternate theory that makes a lot of sense to me. First, the chemical addiction theory, largely based on experiments with laboratory rats, is likely not correct. Second, there is a growing body of evidence that people become addicted to drugs to dull the pain of various kinds of emotional trauma. And third, if the first two premises are true, then our current system of dealing with addiction - based on punishment and stigmatization of addicts - is a perfect strategy to get them to use more drugs.
4
In Herbert H Spiro’s classic Government by constitution: the political systems of democracy he looked at 7 countries’ constitutions and their effectiveness. A major criteria he argued was how well their government fostered conditions for personal and society responsibility—the ability to respond effectively to conditions and needs.
That includes the access to information and resources necessary. Education, fundamentals of food and access to health. Opportunity to make wise and necessary actions and decisions.
Poor schools, poor health, poor access to reasonable and safe employment.
Close a mine or factory? Then what resources are needed to relocate? Say 4 children, husband and wife in rural areas suddenly living too far to commute to available jobs with a house now worth Little or nothing. Rents in the cities where jobs exist impossibly high?
Then a responsible democracy would strive to assist. Education that is second rate would violate the conditions for raising and maintaining a responsible citizenry.
Lest us examine our regional governments to provide as much as possible the opportunities and resources and information and health to have a citizenry able to make responsible decisions and resources to effect them.
2
This gets to the heart of the matter. Too many Americans who have benefitted from public investments in education and environmental health and safety, as well as the luck to have inherited wealth, were born on third base and think they hit a triple.
8
I very much appreciate this follow-up article and wholly agree. I live in the middle of San Francisco where homelessness is all around us and even as liberal as the Bay Area appears to be, I hear more of the”personal responsibility” reasoning than any other. What’s more surprising to me is my own teen, born and marinated in this liberal bubble, also follows this kind of distancing narrative. Human suffering is very hard to watch and perhaps by telling ourselves and others that such fate is largely preventable (eg. explaining to your children that “these people made bad choices”) gives us a sense of control and safety instead of feeling more vulnerable than we all already are.
The readers that sent out casually cruel comments likely have much deeper psychological suffering than those who responded sympathetically. They, too, also deserve our compassion.
268
@Sonya I just spent a week in SF at a conference in downtown, I walked the streets and saw poverty, drug addicts, mentally ill, and open criminal acts worse than any other major city I have visited (and I grew up and live in NYC). The problem seems not to be a tension between resources vs. personal responsibility, it is between personal freedom and government power. Can we force a mentally ill person to take his meds? Stop him from sleeping in the street and using the sidewalk as a toilet? Punish them when they smash car windows and engage in thievery or shoplifting? The answer in California seems to be no, the voters do not want the drug dealers arrested and feel that giving out cash to the homeless is compassionate, even if they turn around and just feed their spiral downward. The result is a growing humanitarian disaster in the heart of one of the most wealthy and liberal cities in the world. The problem is not just a resource issue, it is also a philosophical one that must be confronted, at what point (if any) will we intervene in a person’s bad choices? If alcohol is legal, why can’t I drink myself to death? Mental illness and addiction is not just “despair” — that implies that money or hope would cure it, sorry, this problem is more complex. At what point is tolerating these activities harmful to not just society but those that engage in it as well? California seems past that point. We love freedom and respect an individual’s choices too, so no easy answers exist.
21
@michaelf The homeless do not have access to quality mental health care, which does not come cheap. You think someone without a job or insurance can afford to see a good psychiatrist or therapist, let alone afford the medication to treat their illness? Getting the right diagnosis and finding the best medication(s) to treat any one patient is not as straightforward as you seem to think. Money does go a very long way in addressing mental health.
29
@Susan Here in NYC, in my experience none of the poor have easy access to mental health care of any quality. The investment is simply too low and the demand too high.
I know a 50+ year old on Medicaid who has suffered from depression, anxiety and alcoholism pretty much his whole life. He has been trying to get an appointment to see anyone at all for months and can’t even get someone to call him back. It’s beyond a travesty. It’s a disaster.
27
Mr. Kristof, I couldn't agree more. Everyone makes mistakes in life, but some of us grow up in neighborhoods that come equipped with the societal equivalent of padded dashboards and airbags (to borrow your automobile analogy) -- meaning that we easily survive our mistakes. And some of us grow up in communities filled with spiked dashboards.
I grew up in a comfortable middle-class Long Island suburb, replete with padding and airbags. I went to public schools that provided a first-rate education and sent almost all of their graduates on to college. For the last 37 years, I have been a criminal defense lawyer in D.C. -- a job that has involved me in the lives of many hundreds of (almost all) men from communities that offered many fewer opportunities. When I began, I expected that my clients would be different from the people I had grown up with. That they would be Other.
I was entirely wrong. My clients are like every other group of people that I ever encountered -- in my childhood, at Yale, and in the legal profession. They are kind and selfish, motivated and lazy, honest and dishonest in the same proportions as every other group. The huge differences in their life outcomes are due mostly to the differences in their circumstances.
Most of those who blame and condemn do so out of ignorance. They don't understand how limited others' lives and opportunities are. I beg those people to open their eyes to the wider world.
711
@cds333
While many do condemn out of ignorance, others condemn out of fear. Fear that this may happen to them or their loved ones. They feel if they treat these problems as brought on only by the sufferer, then the chances of addiction, crime etc happening to them are reduced.
20
@Lori Wilson I don't disagree. There are those who condemn out of fear. There are also those who do so out of prejudice. And there are some people who were given every advantage and still manage to ruin their own lives through a commitment to bad choices. It's a complex issue that cannot be fully explored within the limits of a NYT comment.
I think that, when you are talking about people of good will and compassion who routinely blame the victim, the most common reason is ignorance.
13
@cds333
Kristof has clearly identified America’s Achilles heel. It’s a disabling psychosis parading as transcendent virtue, and is manifested in America’s core “values” like meritocracy and individualism which are hard-wired into the American psyche. They hold that failure is no one’s fault but your own. This ethos reduces society to a Darwinistic landscape of competing individuals rather than a functioning collective.
The rhetoric of individualism smears the “common good” in the Constitution - and the government intervention required to execute it – as “socialism.” Its fantasy-laced rhetoric claims that individuals make rational choices that can be woven into a common fabric. But individuals are not “rational” and their choices produce irrational results for the collective.
Four decades of conservative free-market policies fueled by self-interest have funneled the wealth and power to the top, and caused our current social desperation.
Amazingly many of the people who passionately embrace the ethos of individualism are the very people who have suffered its cruel consequences and have been forced into lives of desperation. They blindly cling to individual freedom as a transcendent value - more important than practical social strategies for jobs, education and healthcare.
A “better social narrative” will require not only a helping hand, but also that we rethink our long-standing narrative of impractical “values” inimical to the “common good.”
18
When we give all children in this country the best possible education, plus extra help for those children who need social support because of disfunctional families or absent parents, then we can smugly sit back and pat ourselves on the back. Only then can we evaluate whether success is due only to personal accomplish and not luck and opportunity. We should try to remove luck and "fate" from the success equation. Target efforts to provide each and every child with all the massive opportunity that this country can provide. If not, our national fate will be to fall farther and farther behind on the world stage.
177
@Nancy Leonard I agree. This issue is very complex but if we can level the playing field and give a good education and social support to every child regardless of where he/she lives at least they will have a chance. I can understand people who say they had choices but unless you walk in someone else's shoes you have no right to make a judgment on them. Rich children with all the advantages who end up on the wrong side also have choices but again no one knows what is going on in another person's mind. Addiction/alcoholism is a disease. We wouldn't condemn someone who has cancer so neither should we condemn these people. The law and society have an opportunity to address these issues differently but for some reasons they choose not to. How about condemning the private prisons who make a lot of money from incarcerating those who have made a minor mistake. How about the law who unjustly imprisons someone of color just to get a case resolved. How many are on death row unjustly.
Why not spend the money to rehabilitate, retrain, and counsel these people to regain their dignity. This would greatly improve society. What about all the greed and corruption at the top in this country. Why don't the people who condemn the addict condemn these people. Again, there are no easy solutions to this problem. But we can start by wearing another's shoes.
17
@Nancy Leonard-You've just described why it's never made sense to me to make the quality of education dependent on local taxes. In most advanced countries access to quality education is valued and free up through university. What will it take for the United State to stop restricting and limiting education opportunity for its young learners?
24
@Nancy Leonard
I am struck by your ignoring the plight of these children's most important social support system, their parents. I hope that's just an oversight. Poor parents working two jobs with poor pay and no health insurance are going to be so stressed that they will have a tough time supporting their children.
8
Perhaps the best response to the indifference some of your readers expressed would be to recall a conversation between an American official and a senior official of a nation whose citizens enjoy longer life spans, better basic education, and a higher standard of living do we Americans.
When that U.S. official mocked his Singaporean counterpart for his nation's policy of forcing recalcitrant students to return to high school until they mastered the stipulated skills, the Singaporean said that his nation could not afford to have so much a single citizen who could not participate in the nation's economic and social life.
When we realize that human resources are just as important to our security and success as capital resources and physical resources and devote proper attention to developing all of them, the problems you describe in this column will recede. If not, matters will just become worse.
219
@Quiet Waiting Singapore, which I have visited is a tightly controlled, mostly homogenous society. There is no welfare, or the "dole." Everyone must work, unless they are physically incapable.
There is minimal crime. Police work is considered a boring occupation. Substance abuse is not tolerated, and drug dealers are routinely sentenced to death and hanged. To discourage excessive alcohol consumption, the state heavily taxes all alcoholic beverages.
The failure of any individual Singaporean to be a productive member of society is considered to be disgraceful. We do not have that ethic in the United States. We have become a country of excuses, and no longer expect the underclass to be productive. Entire political campaigns have the theme of excessively taxing the middle class to provide for those who are only motivated to be supported by government largess.
I would be all for a Singaporean type society, with the exception that it is a one party state and oligarchy. That may be why they are so successful.
8