OpinionNicholas Kristof

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By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

Mr. Kristof is the author of a new memoir, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life,” from which this essay is adapted.

More than three-quarters of Americans say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. This year, for the first time, America dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries in this year’s World Happiness Report. Some couples are choosing not to have children because of climate threats. And this despair permeates not just the United States, but much of the world.

This moment is particularly dispiriting because of the toxic mood. Debates about the horrifying toll of the war in Gaza has made the atmosphere even more poisonous, as the turmoil on college campuses underscores. We are a bitterly divided nation, quick to point fingers and denounce one another, and the recriminations feed the gloom. Instead of a City on a Hill, we feel like a nation in despair — maybe even a planet in despair.

Yet that’s not how I feel at all.

What I’ve learned from four decades of covering misery is hope — both the reasons for hope and the need for hope. I emerge from years on the front lines awed by material and moral progress, for we have the good fortune to be part of what is probably the greatest improvement in life expectancy, nutrition and health that has ever unfolded in one lifetime.

Many genuine threats remain. We could end up in a nuclear war with Russia or China; we might destroy our planet with carbon emissions; the gap between the wealthy and the poor has widened greatly in the United States in recent decades (although global inequality has diminished); we may be sliding toward authoritarianism at home; and 1,000 other things could go wrong.

Yet whenever I hear that America has never been such a mess or so divided, I think not just of the Civil War but of my own childhood: the assassinations of the 1960s, the riots, the murders of civil rights workers, the curses directed at returning Vietnam veterans, the families torn apart at generational seams, the shooting of students at Kent State, the leftists in America and abroad who quoted Mao and turned to violence because they thought society could never evolve.

If we got through that, we can get through this.

My message of hope rubs some Americans the wrong way. They see war, can’t afford to buy a house, struggle to pay back student debt and what’s the point anyway, when we’re boiling the planet? Fair enough: My job is writing columns about all these worries.

Yet all this malaise is distorting our politics and our personal behaviors, adding to the tensions and divisions in society. Today’s distress can nurture cynicism rather than idealism, can be paralyzing, can shape politics by fostering a Trumpian nostalgia for some grand mythical time in the past.

The danger is that together all of us in society collectively reinforce a melancholy that leaves us worse off. Despair doesn’t solve problems; it creates them. It is numbing and counterproductive, making it more difficult to rouse ourselves to tackle the challenges around us.

The truth is that if you had to pick a time to be alive in the past few hundred thousand years of human history, it would probably be now.

When I step back, what I see over the arc of my career is a backdrop of progress in America and abroad that is rarely acknowledged — and that should give us perspective and inspire us to take on the many challenges that still confront us.

I think of a woman named Delfina, whom I interviewed in 2015 in a village in Angola. She had never seen a doctor or dentist and had lost 10 of her 15 children. Delfina had rotten teeth and lived in constant, excruciating dental pain. She had never heard of family planning, and there was no school in the area, so she and all the other villagers were........

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