‘Tightrope’ finds Americans on a perilous walk
Husband-and-wife authors explore stories of struggle across U.S.
“Tightrope” — a new book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn — opens with a story involving domestic abuse and gunfire. The authors set a scene in 1973 at the Knapp household in Yamhill, a rural town about halfway between Portland and the Oregon coast. From there, they track the fates of Dee and Gary Knapp and their five children. “Tightrope” would be a short book if things turned out well for the
Knapps. But like so many of the other kids that rode the No. 6 school bus with Kristof, they struggled enormously.
“Dead, dead, dead, dead,” the authors write. A fifth Knapp child has been imprisoned, addicted and suffers from HIV and hepatitis. A quarter of the kids on that bus are gone, a devastating figure that prompted Kristof and WuDunn — the first married couple to win a Pulitzer Prize — to look at what happened in Yamhill. The result is “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope,” their new book that uses Yamhill as a point of entry to probe difficult times in both rural and urban areas across the States. Joblessness, depression and addiction are just three attributes that tie together different stories of struggle.
“We were attuned to these issues because of our regular visits back to Yamhill and seeing the distress in this community that I love very much,” says Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times. “It’s an area that has gone through so much upheaval. But we also wanted it to be bigger than that one town. We recognized this is not just a problem in rural white America. It’s in Appalachia, inner cities, farming communities.”
Both authors see parallels between issues in Yamhill and Baltimore.
“When I was growing up, you’d hear disparaging comments about blacks in the city and their struggles being the result of people not working hard,” he says. “Then flash forward: When the jobs go in Yamhill, the community engages in the same patterns. I think it’s clear this isn’t about culture. It’s about when jobs go, people suffer tremendously. There’s the loss of dignity as well as income. They self-medicate. People who are less employable are less marriageable. And you have shattered family structures.”
“Tightrope” charts an American goal as it scales back from prosperity to survival. Seven years after the publication of George Packer’s landmark “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America,” Kristof and WuDunn find things further unraveling and in a more pervasive manner.
“Homelessness is just one extreme of this,” says WuDunn, a former New York Times correspondent who now works in finance and consulting. “We wanted to report on a wide swath. There’s nowhere in the U.S. where a husband and wife with two kids — each of the parents with a full-time job at minimum wage — can rent without going over the guidelines for affordable housing. You have people spending half or two-thirds of their take-home pay on rent. Even people with full-time jobs are struggling.”
For the first time in a century, life expectancy in the United States has fallen three years in a row. Median household income has headed downward also. Anger, stress and dissatisfaction with life have been on the rise. The writers look at many of the systems that have facilitated this crisis. And true to the book’s subtitle, Kristof and WuDunn set out not just to identify stories of struggles but also to find those that offer hope, particularly those that assist children. Annette Dove is among them: She has for nearly two decades worked at TOPPS (Targeting Our People’s Priorities with Service), an organization that assists teens in Pine Bluff, Ark.
“She’s one person trying to change her community,” WuDunn says. “There was no government support. So it fell into private hands. And her work is pretty heroic.”
The authors find several such stories, though they’re almost exclusively hyper-local.
“We didn’t want to just describe problems,” Kristof says. “But it seemed to us at the end of the day that there are no silver bullets. But maybe there’s something more like silver buckshot. Things we all can do to make a difference.”
WuDunn says these smaller success stories will ideally take the place of other, bigger policies that have been implemented and failed. She brings up safe or supervised injection sites — an idea that has been met with resistance. The idea is to provide a space for drug users with trained staff on site to intervene in the event of an overdose. These sites are, WuDunn says, “more permissive, but they also allow access to rehabilitation staff. We haven’t been flexible enough to explore other opportunities. To adapt or change.
“There are still ladders out there for people to climb. But our society has reduced the number of ladders.”
The Progressive Forum will bring Kristof and WuDunn to Houston this week to talk about the book and the reporting that fed it. Lest anyone think the book is a condemnation of the current presidential administration, they are clear that policy failures have been a bipartisan effort.
Kristoff says one issue with President Donald Trump is not policyrelated but rather that “he sucks all the oxygen out of the room. Impeachment, the election, these are important issues, but they’re not the only important issues. You have 68,000 overdoses each year, and more people dying from alcohol. Americans are living shorter lives. We need to think about how to respond to these problems instead of getting sucked into the news of the day.”