Striking semblances between political and social unrest in other countries and the United States have Nicholas Kristof concerned that democracy in his home country is under threat.
The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and columnist for the New York Times shared his thoughts during a talk before the Newberg City Club and local citizenry on Tuesday, May 4, in the grand ballroom of the Chehalem Cultural Center.
The Yamhill native — who was also highlighting the release of his latest book, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life” — began the talk with an anecdote about his ill-fated run for Oregon governor in 2022, where he was disqualified for running as he didn’t meet the residency requirements.
“It’s actually brave that (the city club) seeks some political insight from somebody who couldn’t manage the insight to actually get on the ballot,” he quipped. “I’m probably the first person ever to run for governor in Oregon and not have a single ballot cast in his favor, although my wife puts it more gently. Sheryl says, ‘Look, this side of Kim Jong Un in North Korea, you’re the only person that had an entire political career (where) you’ve never had nobody vote against you.’”
On covering Tiananmen Square
All jokes aside, Kristof shared experiences in other countries that shaped his view on politics and democracy. Topping the list and an occurrence particularly suited for discussion on the day of his talk was the massacre of protestors at Tiananmen Square in China in 1989. April 15 was the 35th anniversary of the pro-democracy movement being stomped out by that country’s government. Kristof was amongst the protesters while covering the protests for the New York Times.
“You never forget seeing a modern army use weapons of war against an unarmed crowd of peaceful protesters,” he said, adding that it could be seen as a cautionary tale about recent actions in the United States.
Kristoff bemoaned some of his coverage of China’s pro-democracy movement, writing that some of the protesters were “less educated workers and peasants coming in from the countryside” to join the movement.
“I’d written a little bit scornfully that, well, they say they are fighting for democracy, but they can’t really define democracy, don’t really know what institutions they want to create, etc.,” he said. “And there was something to that, but that terrible night, as the troops were opening fire and I was cowering as everybody else was, the greatest people that night were these unemployed, these peasants from the countryside, these workers who were rickshaw drivers. And whenever there was a lull in the firing, they would peddle their rickshaws out toward the troops and pick up the bodies of kids who had been killed or injured and then put them in the backs of the rickshaws and peddle off frantically to the hospitals. And maybe they couldn’t define democracy, but they were risking their lives for it.”
Over the years the actions of the protesters to demand change in a communist country struck Kristof and highlighted what he characterized as Americans taking for granted the systems the country has and the guardrails and institutions in place to make democracy work.
“And I think that, in this country, we don’t always appreciate what we have and could learn something from the courage and tenacity of those peasants that were fighting for democracy in China,” he said.
Kristof spoke briefly about the obstacles and dangers of being a foreign correspondent and the effect it can have on family back home.
“I was going on adrenaline — I was terrified much of the time — but I was going on adrenaline and for your family members, they’re just terrified for you all the time,” he said.
As such, relating the dangers of reporting abroad to family required a delicate touch, but above all transparency, “Including when you’re in a plane crash in the Congo,” he quipped.
Kristof had attempted to spare his wife the details of a flight gone horribly wrong, thinking it would be easier on her.
“I thought maybe a plane crash in the Congo is something you tell your spouse about after you’re home and sitting opposite from her, where we can assure that everything is fine,” he said. “That seemed very reasonable to me. … Unfortunately, one of the editors in New York was talking to Sheryl and said, ‘Oh, it’s terrible about Nick’s plane crash,’ and I was so busted.”
Tumult closer to home
The effects of covering massacres, genocide and wars abroad convinced Kristof that a return home to Yamhill to “heal” was in order. But when he arrived he discovered “Yamhill was going through its own humanitarian crisis.”
Bad times had struck close to home and dealing with it was difficult.
“When you’re covering a crisis abroad you have some distance and it’s a little bit easier,” Kristof said.
He related the background of the town he grew up in, which had about 500 residents at the time and was a thriving berg until the economy tanked, factories and canneries closed “and the community went through a real wringer.” The economic downturn corresponded with the advent of meth in the community and things became bleak.
Illustrating the downfall was the fate of the children he rode with on the No. 6 bus to elementary and high school in Yamhill, all “gone from drugs, alcohol and suicide — one-third,” he said. One family lost, over the years, all five children to drugs, alcohol and suicide.
“Their mom still walks up the hill each day to visit the graves of her five dead kids,” Kristof said.
In most cases parents in Yamhill had lost their jobs and their status as middle-class families. Compounded with a community that didn’t stress education because even dropouts could get good jobs working in nearby factories and canneries, the town’s fate was sealed.
Economic hardship and the political battlefront
The cycle of poverty and dysfunction is carried over as well. While his friends all suffered greatly, they also visited suffering on others, he said, adding that although he had written at length about sexual violence in other countries, it was the two boys he knew from the No. 6 bus that were later convicted for raping young girls that may have affected him the most.
“(I’m) trying to understand how that happened in a community where we prided ourselves on our strong rural values and looking after each other,” he said. “It became apparent that this wasn’t just one bus route and this wasn’t one small town or county … this is what was happening throughout the working class across the country when working class jobs went away.”
These folks’ struggles caused Kristof to focus on how to address what went wrong, including the toxic political effects wrought by economic hardship. Marginalization and resentment fueled things like the Jan. 6 insurrection, two-thirds of the county’s voters voted for Trump, many were resistant to vaccines, many were subscribing to outlandish conspiracy theories and old friends said they were willing to take up arms to “take their country back.”
“I’ve seen this happen in other countries. I think there are real risks for democracy, for society, until we can find a better way to heal some of these rifts,” he said.
Fostering education and resiliency
To that end, he opined, the country must build a more sustainable economic model and an education system that gives everyone the skills they need to compete in a global market. That starts, he added, with more Oregon kids staying in school and graduating.
“If you drop out of school in 2024 then you’re cooked, your kids are cooked and those people will not only suffer pain, they will inflict it on others,” Kristof said. “A society can’t thrive when so many individuals are really struggling.”
He pointed to the state’s shortcomings in Pre-K through graduation funding, K-12 outcomes that are below that of Mississippi and the dwindling number of students who are attending college.
“Any one of those statistics can be problematic, hard to measure for some of these things, but as a whole what you see is a state where we are not doing enough,” he said.
He admitted that he often “straddles” between two worlds: the highly educated folks he covers and works with back east and the folks back home in Yamhill. The two factions are worlds apart.
“I think that there is a deep resentment from the Yamhill world toward what they would think of as the world of elites,” he said. “There is something to that resentment and it is true that a lot of policies were created that didn’t consider what was happening, what was unfolding, in places like Yamhill …”
Despite spending years reporting from aboard — and “those were important stories” — he also noted that about every 17 days more people die from alcohol, drugs and suicide in the United States than the country lost in 20 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I don’t think that we as a society, that we as journalists, I don’t think our leaders, I don’t think we as a public have come to terms with the degree of pain and struggle that is unfolding in so many communities,” Kristof said, adding that the educated, and sometimes liberal element, tend to condescend to the white working class in a way that inflames their reaction and causes them to migrate toward the fringe of politics.
His and his wife’s response has been to advocate for the town of Yamhill and the farmers who are his neighbors in the countryside. That included tearing out their cherry orchard and planting cider apples and wine grapes, which exposed him to some of the challenges of commercial farming.
“As a liberal columnist I rarely meet a regulation I don’t like and all of a sudden as a small business owner I’m outraged about every regulation, so it’s a good to build another muscle and see the world in a different way,” he said.
But despite all that he has seen, Kristof remains hopeful, hence the title of his book.
“The other thing you see in reporting is that side by side with the worst of humanity you find the very best. … We humans are capable of amazing things,” he said.
He related the story about a woman in Pakistan who was sentenced by the court to be gang raped for some indiscretion and carried it through with the notion that she would commit suicide in shame.
Instead, she prosecuted her attackers, sent them to prison and then she used the compensation money to create a school in the village “because she thought that education would actually help chip away at the misogyny and violence that had led to the attack on her,” Kristof said.
“And then she enrolled the children of her attackers in her school and it is impossible to leave that little village after talking to Muktar, after talking to the kids in the school, after seeing those children of her attackers there, and just not feel some ray of hope based on our capacity, when we are challenged, when see these challenges around us to respond with strength and resilience and courage and decency.”
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