Tightrope

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-20

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Symbols & Motifs

Tightrope

Tightropes emerge as a motif throughout the book, describing the narrow path that many working-class people must walk to avoid falling into ruin—a path that is too precarious for many people to follow. The authors highlight people’s individual experiences to show how walking this line—which some researchers call the “success sequence”: “graduate from high school, get a full-time job and marry before having children” (23)—is in fact nearly impossible for many people, given the circumstances in which they live.

This tightrope is largely invisible to more affluent Americans, for whom the path through life is broad and forgiving of missteps. This distinction reflects the fact that most of the economic gains in the latter half of the 20th and first decade of the 21st centuries have gone to the wealthy. This situation in turn compounds the suffering of those living in poverty, as wealthy Americans, ignorant or indifferent to the challenges faced by working-class citizens, promote policies that are punitive and cruel to the poor. This process is also facilitated by cultural attitudes that view poverty as a moral failing, without acknowledging the tightrope that people in poverty are trying to walk—people like Drew Goff, the son of a friend of the authors, who struggled with addiction and incarceration stemming from his own deprived upbringing. While Goff turned his life around, thanks in part to a program for men recovering from addiction, Goff described the ever-present danger that he’d fall back into his old ways and into the cycle that started with his parents: “The old me wants to act out, and I will not allow that,” he said, adding, “It’s a tightrope that I’m walking. And sometimes it seems to be made of fishing line” (239).

The symbol of the tightrope also prompts reflection on ways to create more safety nets for people if they fall. The authors’ suggestions include universal healthcare, a monthly child allowance, and universal high school graduation. These government interventions would allow more people to move through the “success sequence” that keeps most people out of poverty but would not make walking this tightrope incumbent upon the individual’s luck and privilege; rather, it would open the more forgiving path through life currently enjoyed by the affluent to a greater share of the population.

School Bus

In Tightrope, the authors use the symbol of the school bus to highlight how the fate of a group of people—particularly, the children with whom Kristof grew up in Yamhill, but more generally, all American citizens—who were once headed in the same direction. Prior to the 1970s, American policies granted upward mobility to even the poorest citizens (at least those who were white, as these policies often did not apply to Black people); in a sense, all citizens were on the same school bus. As policies promoted inequality and undermined that cohesion, working-class communities fell apart, “felled by lost jobs, broken families and despair” (8).

The symbol of the school bus is significant in another way, in that is shows the importance, and the limits, of education. In the latter case, the fact that Kristof and other children in Yamhill rode the bus together—and attended the same school—but nonetheless had such different outcomes in life shows the extent to which children’s success in school depends on much more than the availability of education. Also important are where their schools are located, and who they serve—Black children, for instance, are much more likely to attend schools that perform poorly—as well as the stability of children’s home lives (single-parent households are correlated with lower graduation rates) and how much the parents value education. In other words, for children to succeed in school, other protective factors must be in place. On top of this, affluent families have access to other supports, such as private school, SAT coaches, and “enrichment programs,” which help their children gain access to top universities: “77 percent of kids in the top quartile of incomes graduate from college, compared to 9 percent of kids in the bottom quartile” (44). There are consequences for people’s long-term well-being, as a college degree is associated with nearly an extra $1 million in lifetime earnings. The fact that college is out of reach for so many entrenches poverty.

The symbol of the school bus also shows the potential of education to reduce inequality and increase social mobility. As the authors note, rising education levels were a sign of America’s improving living standards prior to the 1970s; for the Knapp family, whose children rode the school bus, the fact that the kids of Kristof’s generation were better educated than their parents was a sign that the family’s fortunes were improving. To regain the promise offered by this symbol, therefore, the government must put measures in place to ensure people are adequately educated for the 21st-century society, including policies that foster universal high school graduation and increased vocational and skills-based education in schools, to help working-class people find meaningful and decently paid work.

Drugs

Many of the people the authors profile in Tightrope struggle with addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, and to processed food. Drugs are a particularly powerful symbol, as they also demonstrate the ways in which the United States has adopted a punitive and misguided approach to the problems of the working class, while letting those most responsible for these problems off the hook. Other changes in American policies, such as the war on drugs, meant that drug addiction often became a route to a felony conviction, making people less employable or marriageable, and entrenching their poverty. In this way, drugs are both a symbol of the increasing inequality in American society and a cause of it.

Many of the people living with addiction that the authors talk to are struggling with opioid addiction. The roots of the opioid epidemic in the United States can be traced back to the reckless marketing of prescription opioids by Purdue Pharma and other companies; these companies claimed opioids were a safe, nonaddictive treatment for chronic pain, even as they knew the opposite to be true. Lax government oversight allowed opioid prescriptions to proliferate, and when the scale of the problem became known and people were cut off their prescriptions, many turned to heroin instead. Despite this clear link between pharmaceutical companies and widespread addiction and death, no executives were jailed, and companies received relatively modest fines that are dwarfed by the profits they made from opioids. Meanwhile, the population of America’s prisons ballooned in the latter half of the 20th century, in part because of harsh penalties for possession introduced in the 1980s. Drugs, therefore, are both an example and a symbol of the ways in which America’s two-tier system—one set of standards for the wealthy, and another for the poor—is exacerbating inequality and increasing working-class misery.

Drugs also demonstrate the despair of working classes. Surveys show that many working-class people expect their children’s lives to be worse than their own; similarly, as blue-collar jobs disappeared, many people lost confidence in themselves, for, as the authors note, a job is strongly associated with self-esteem and self-worth. This disappearance of jobs left people more susceptible to drug addiction to numb the despair. Drugs and drug addiction are therefore a symbol not of the moral weakness of working-class people, but of an underlying malaise, which is the responsibility of all of American society to address.