Nicholas Kristof https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/20/opinion/trauma-pain-assault.html
I also fear that some readers may believe that I’m minimizing a brutal assault, or will be perplexed that I remained friends with a violent drug dealer who in many ways destroyed a young woman’s life. I make no excuses for Bill or his actions. But one thing I’ve learned in a lifetime of reporting is that humans contain multitudes, and in this case I hope we might learn from Bill’s troubled journey how trauma self-replicates: When we let so many Americans fall behind, they not only suffer greatly but also inflict great suffering on others.
Bill Beard never lived up to his rich potential. He hurt. And he hurt others. For those struggling in America, pain can be transitive.
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... there isn’t a good term for the bundle of pathologies that have afflicted working-class Americans like Bill.
My “How America Heals” series has explored how to overcome these afflictions, which include stagnant incomes, addiction, homelessness, suicide, chronic pain, loneliness and early death. We still don’t fully understand how they are correlated or why most of them affect men more than women. I do believe that, as with Friedan’s probing of gender inequity, our explorations of these problems will help us chip away at them. That’s the reason for this series: A nation cannot thrive when so many have been left behind.
One gauge of how many Americans are struggling is that average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a metric for blue-collar earnings, were lower in the first half of 2023 than they had been (adjusted for inflation) in the first half of 1969. That’s not a misprint.
Another: If the federal minimum wage of 1968 had kept pace with inflation and productivity, it would now be more than $25 an hour. Instead, it’s stuck at $7.25.
The Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton popularized the term “deaths of despair” for the tumbling life expectancy among working-class Americans since 2010, but the tragedy goes far beyond the staggering mortality. For each person who dies from drugs, alcohol and suicide, many others are mired in addiction and heap pain on their families. Gerhardt told me that she had been addicted to heroin for years, underscoring how widespread this malady is: Perpetrator and victim shared a parallel suffering, and both died before the age of 65.
The challenges are particularly acute for Black and Native American men. Native American males have a life expectancy of only 61.5 years, shorter than men in India, Egypt and Venezuela. And the median wage of Black men in 2020 was only 55 percent of that of white men, a smaller share than it had been in the late 1960s.
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“Capitalism in America today is not working for the two-thirds of adults who do not have a B.A.,” Professor Deaton said in a lecture in Amsterdam. When a Nobel Prize-winning economist warns that capitalism is failing most Americans, it’s worth paying attention. ...
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“As long as you have the mental capacity to know right from wrong, it’s your own damn fault” if you get into trouble, he said. “You can’t blame anyone else. It’s ludicrous. Who is there to blame?”
I pushed back. Didn’t the addiction crisis have something to do with larger forces like lost jobs, declining earning power and failed education and mental health policies?
Yes, he acknowledged that there was something to that, but he wouldn’t budge from his embrace of 100 percent personal responsibility, including when it came to his assault on Betty Gerhardt. “I was high; I was angry,” he said, about his mental state at the time. “Nobody else made me do it. How can you blame anybody else?”
While I admire Bill’s acceptance of responsibility, it’s also true that none of this unfolded in a vacuum. He made appalling decisions — but why was it that tens of millions of Americans were suddenly making bad decisions?
The previous generation of working-class Americans had thrived with a booming economy, rising education levels and union jobs. But in blue-collar neighborhoods, the generation that Bill and I belonged to imploded. Among our close neighbors where we grew up, two other boys were later convicted of raping young girls in separate incidents, another was convicted of armed robbery, a girl was convicted of attempted murder and a boy set someone on fire in a drug deal gone wrong.
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the context: a poorly educated work force that had few options when good blue-collar jobs went away; the proliferation of hard drugs and a lack of treatment programs; and an atomization of society following the unraveling of the social fabric and the collapse of churches, clubs and other local institutions.
The no-excuses personal responsibility narrative has been absorbed by many working-class Americans, and it can be highly motivating; it’s often a pillar of efforts to overcome addiction. Yet this narrative can also be dispiriting when people fall short of their aspirations, amplifying their sense that they are hopeless screw-ups — and that in turn can mean one more reason to reach for narcotics to numb the pain.
I wonder: What killed my buddy Bill Beard? In one sense, he killed himself by making bad choices. That’s what he would say. Yet as long as we’re talking about responsibility, shouldn’t we also be having a conversation about our collective responsibility for the squeeze on working-class Americans that made dumb moves more likely?
... mentoring ... job skills ...
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