I always appreciate Kristof's grace-filled reporting and writing. This book is no exception.

Tightrope is a compassionate look at the wave of "deaths of despair" that has swept over American society in the past couple decades. The numbers are appalling but this book focuses more on individual stories of friends from Kristof and WuDunn's hometown in Oregon to help the reader develop a comprehensive empathy for the plight of working class Americans. The book touches on policy decisions and glaring gaps in ideologies on both sides of the American political landscape, so I thought it was a very fair chiding of deliberate blindspots. The book directly and repeatedly challenges the fantasy of "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps," wryly explaining that the idiom originally meant the opposite of what it means today--it is physically impossible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

I have read extensively on the subject of the "deaths of despair," mostly because it is hard for me to rectify the smoldering America I now watch from a distance with my perception of the America of my 1990's youth. It is hard to wrap my mind around what's happened and what has changed. So because of my reading, most of the information here was not new to me. The numbers are always shocking though, and overall it's depressing to contemplate. I felt physically upset while reading the book this week.

I did appreciate that there are action steps at the end of the book (something I felt compelled to write on my blog after I read Just Mercy and was left high and dry on what to do next). But to be honest, American culture needs a reckoning. Every person needs to be struck in their emotional and spiritual core in order for a change to take place. I can only pray that all the carnage caused by COVID-19 and the painful lessons we are learning about how the economy and employment really function will not go to waste.

As an aside, one thing I couldn't stop thinking about while reading this is my growing belief that American Christians should not be sending missionaries to other countries. No more. Enough. I've done my share of short term trips, and I grew immensely as a person during that time. But I think that level of "getting out of your comfort zone" for a week or two could easily be found by serving the poorest and most downtrodden in the US, and there are millions of those to be found. Semester-long mission projects/internships could instead be spent lobbying politicians, community organizing, and volunteering with afterschool programs. Isn't an oft-quoted adage by long term m's in the field that "the best people to reach a people are their own people" citing lifelong work by people who natively know the culture and language as the most effective? America is cancerous, its church is violently ill, and we're kidding ourselves if we think our spiritual nudity isn't on full display to the world. I live abroad but praise God I stopped fooling myself about my spirituality years ago. /end midnight rant.