In Nicholas Kristof’s final essay in the New York Times last week he announced that he is leaving the Times to run for governor in his home state of Oregon. I’ve always appreciated Kristof’s writing and at a very selfish level I am sad to see him leave. The link to his essay is provided below. It is well worth your time to read and consider.
I
suspect Kristof would make a good governor. He is bright, insightful and highly
articulate. More than that, he knows suffering when he sees it because he seen
a lot of it in his lifetime. In a time when many Americans are unemployed, dying
from a preventable disease and numbing their pain with one of many possible addictive
behaviors, we need public servants who are attuned to human suffering.
But I also suspect that he will be furiously opposed by moneyed ideologues who will make his election doubtful. Should be prevail at the polls, a term as governor will prove challenging on a good day. And that’s in Oregon, a state that I would call relatively progressive. I can’t even imagine him running here in Florida, a state in which the lives of one out of every 350 residents have been leveraged so far to serve the political ambitions of its adolescent governor.
These are the realities of political of life in 2021 America.
A
Willingness to Engage Suffering
What struck me about Kristof’s goodbye essay was his discussion of how his encounter with suffering had impacted his life. He writes:
The genocide in Darfur
seared me and terrified me. To cover the slaughter there, I sneaked across
borders, slipped through checkpoints, ingratiated myself with mass murderers.
In Darfur, it was hard to keep from weeping as I interviewed shellshocked children
who had been shot, raped or orphaned. No one could report in Darfur and not
smell the evil in the air.
I
strongly resonate with that. Though I have not had the lengthy deep immersion
in suffering that Kristof experienced in Africa and China, suffering is a constant
in human existence and I have had more than my share of opportunities to engage
it first-hand.
My village family at Las Guabitas, Panama 1994
I have no idea what drew me to Central America for all those many visits or what called me to teach in ghetto schools or represent juveniles and mentally ill clients as a public defender. What I do know is that when those callings came, I was only certain of two things. The first was that I I needed to answer them. The second was that I was sure what I experienced in those situations would change me for life.
I simply had no idea how deeply.
I hear a lot of those themes in Kristof’s column. I also hear some of my own responses to the evil that we have both encountered. To wit:
In particular, I want to make clear that while I’ve spent my career on the front lines of human suffering and depravity, covering genocide, war, poverty and injustice, I’ve emerged firmly believing that we can make real progress by summoning the political will.
We are an amazing species, and we can do better….
We largely know how to improve well-being at home and abroad.
What we lack is the political will.
Sculpture, Mary McLeod Bethune, Godmother of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, Florida’s new offering to the Hall of Statuary in the U.S. Capitol
It is a common refrain in my sermons, blog entries and social media postings that I think we can do better as a people and that it can make all the difference in the world for all of us. And, like Kristof, I am clear that the problem is never our capacities or even our resources to do so, it is our political will that stands in the way.
But that is what I fear most as I watch the current slow motion civil war unfolding around me.
Clearly the glazed over zealots like those who invaded our Capitol January 6 make me very uneasy. They are unpredictable and volatile. Increasingly they articulate far-fetched rationalizations for their resort to violence which they see as their first option. And many of them strike me as desperate.
I accept that they are a given at this point in our history. And they arose in a particular context. In retrospect, it is not terribly surprising to see these angry, violent responses. Between an economic system that squeezes the life out of virtually all it touches – including one’s sense of self-respect - and a culture that encourages constant distraction to avoid feeling the pain, it’s hardly surprising that the loss of the soul that inevitably results from such a context would generate no small amount of anger. Indeed, it is an expectable response. And violence is an expectable expression of that anger.
But what I fear more is the many loving and caring people in this country who are unwilling to recognize the existential threat which we face and unwilling to meet it head on. At a very basic level, denial is the greatest enemy of any hopes for a peaceful resolution of the challenges besetting us.
Unlike the volatile minority who gleefully talk about acting out their angst with weaponry, most of our countrymen and women are not driven by malevolence and inveterate misanthropy. Instead, what I see is psychic couch potatoes, those who long ago traded in their responsible citizenship for being well-trained consumers, addicted to comfort and narcoticized by agents of mass distraction. Some come in bottles, some come in pills and some come in streaming media. But all have the intended effect of preventing any effective resistance to the evil that is increasingly coming to a head in our country and the world around us.
Hannah Arendt was much criticized for her observations on the banality of evil that she saw as permitting the rise of an authoritarianism in Germany that ultimately proved genocidal. But she is hardly alone in that observation. And it is not hard to see the same kind of banality in service of forces of evil in our own country teetering on the edge of authoritarianism today. When good people do nothing, as Burke observed, evil will have its way.
Kristof’s
reference to the missing ingredient, the political will, in the face of a
challenge with enormous potential for harm is hardly original. I hear echoes of
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in these words. The recent alarms from the
world’s climatologists about the accelerating arrival of pending climate
disasters confirms the concerns that Gore was articulating a decade ago – if we
don’t act now and act decisively, we face existential peril. Even now, it is
almost too late.
Gore observed a decade and a half ago that it was not our capacity or our resources that were missing, it was the political will.
He was right. And so is Kristof.
Alongside the Monsters Were Heroes
That’s why Kristof’s dogged refusal to become cynical or engage in a grim determinism is refreshing. He says:
Yet alongside the
monsters, I invariably found heroes….Even in a landscape of evil, the most
memorable people aren’t the Himmlers and Eichmanns but the Anne Franks and
Raoul Wallenbergs — and Suad Ahmeds — capable of exhilarating goodness in the
face of nauseating evil. They are why I left the front lines not depressed but
inspired.
A sizeable chunk of my graduate study was focused on the Holocaust and I have since had the privilege of studying at the Holocaust Center in D.C. The examples that Kristof cited were people unwilling to be determined by that evil they were encountering, the Holocaust in the first two examples and the ongoing wave of terrorism that is Islamism in the other. And in all three cases, they were courageous human beings determined to share their stories of the suffering they had witnessed.
I am clear that all of us who have been entrusted with visions of human suffering have the obligation to share them with the world if for no other reason than to give a voice to those too often silenced by violence. If Burke is right that the only thing needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, witnesses of suffering who remain silent in the wake of the deeply disturbing revelations they have been given inevitably become complicit in the evil they fail to recount.
In that light, I offer my thanks to Nicholas Kristoff for his willingness to write the stories of suffering that none of us wanted to read but which all of us needed to hear. I wish him well in his new venture. May his example of public service and resilience in the face of evil serve as a lesson for us all.
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Harry Scott Coverston
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