Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope Hardcover is a tough read; Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-wife-super-journalist team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn trace the lives of a number of Kristof's childhood friends, all from the vicinity of Yamhill, Oregon and they end up reporting on income inequality in America . . . one of my favorite phrases I learned from the book is "talking left and walking right," which a number of successful liberal families employ . . . they are all for divorce and abortion and legalized drug-use, but rarely need these in their own lives-- it seems conservative values about family and school make the difference in who escapes poverty in places like Yamhill . . . anyway, here's a couple of excerpts that I pulled by taking a photo of the page with my phone and then opening that photo with Google docs . . . the Google AI "reads" the photo and does a decent job making it text:
When so many Americans make the same bad choice, that should be a clue simply individual moral failure. It is a systemic failure.
Here's one way of looking at what happened: Daniel was injured on the job, and then doctors in and out of the military prescribed highly addictive opioids that got him hooked. That was because the government, through lax oversight, empowered pharmaceutical companies to profit from reckless marketing. Once Daniel was addicted. didn't try adequately to help him, but rather spit him out, and the became a target not of public health efforts but of the criminal system. The government failed him, blamed him, and jailed him.
A couple of generations ago, the United States rewarded veterans by affording them education and housing benefits. More recently, the United States helped get veterans hooked on drugs and then incarcerated them.
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We Americans are a patriotic tribe, and we tend to wax lyrical about our land of plenty and opportunity. "We have never been a nation of haves and have-nots," Senator Marco Rubio once declared. “We are a nation of haves and soon-to-haves, of people who have made it and people who will make it." We proudly assert, “We're number 1!" and in terms of overall economic and military strength, we are. But in other respects our self-confidence is delusional.
Here's the blunt, harsh truth.
America ranks number 40 in child mortality, according to the Social Progress Index, which is based on research by three Nobel Prize-winning economists and covers 146 countries for which there is reliable data. We rank number 32 in internet access, number 39 in access to clean drinking water, number 50 in personal safety, and number 61 in high-school enrollment. Somehow, "We're number 61!" doesn’t seem so proud a boast. Overall, the Social Progress Index ranks the United States number 25 in the well-being of citizens.
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