Yet this is an uplifting slum. Against all odds, Kibera is also a place of hope, and it offers a lesson in bottom-up development that the world should learn from.

The tale begins with a boy whose single mom — 15 years old when she gave birth — named him Kennedy, because she wanted him to be like an American president she had heard of. Little Kennedy Odede didn’t attend formal school, and at the age of 10 he ran away from a violent stepfather and ended up sleeping on the streets.

Kennedy taught himself to read and was inspired by a biography of Nelson Mandela that a researcher shared with him. Kennedy, ebullient and charismatic, then formed a Kibera self-help association called Shining Hope for Communities, better known as SHOFCO.

An American student from Wesleyan University, Jessica Posner, volunteered at SHOFCO and then persuaded Wesleyan to accept Kennedy as a full scholarship student, even though he had never even gone through a real elementary school. Jessica and Kennedy fell in love and married when he graduated.

One of SHOFCO’s early projects was Kibera School for Girls, which recruited some of the most impoverished girls in the slum. Their parents were sometimes illiterate, and one-fifth of those little girls had been sexually assaulted. Yet the girls knew that they were special, and with intensive tutoring they turned into star students, outperforming children at expensive Kenyan private schools.

I am an old friend of Kennedy and have been following his work since my first visit a dozen years ago. One girl I met then, when she was a second grader, is now studying at Columbia University. Her former classmates are studying at four other U.S. universities as well as at Kenyan universities.

Let’s just acknowledge that development is hard, particularly in urban slums that are growing fast around the world. Billions of dollars are poured into the poorest countries, and in Haiti and South Sudan one sees fleets of expensive white SUVs driven by aid organizations; what’s missing is long-term economic development. International aid keeps children alive, which is no small feat. But it has had less success in transforming troubled places.

That’s where SHOFCO is intriguing as an alternative model. Its grassroots empowerment approach has similarities with BRAC, a Bangladesh-based development organization that I consider one of the most effective aid groups in the world, and with Fonkoze, a similar homegrown nonprofit in Haiti.

SHOFCO has spread through low-income communities across Kenya and now boasts 2.4 million members, making it one of the largest grassroots organizations in Africa. It provides clean water, fights sexual assault, runs a credit union, coaches people on starting small businesses, runs libraries and internet hot spots, mobilizes voters to press politicians to bring services to slums, runs public health campaigns and does 1,000 other things.

It succeeds, I think, because it exemplifies a partnership: local leadership paired with a reliance on the best international practices. SHOFCO, for example, adopted deworming and cervical cancer prevention programs that reflect the best international knowledge, and these were accepted by local people partly because they trusted Kennedy.

I often write about poverty, and while the subject can be depressing at times, I also regularly find reason to be inspired.

Kibera still needs sewers, schools and decent roads, but Lauren’s success is a reminder of what a grassroots organization can accomplish against all odds in even the grittiest slum. That fills me with hope. Shining hope.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

Throngs of ordinary Chinese — “old hundred names” in Chinese parlance — took to the streets to express frustration with China’s repressive COVID-19 lockdowns and, implicitly, with China’s overall repression. Many held up blank sheets of paper, signifying that they could not say what they wanted.

Xi read those blank sheets of paper, though. Police detained many protesters and blocked off areas where people might gather — but the Chinese government still was forced to bow to public opinion. It brightly declared a “new situation” and on Wednesday relaxed its COVID-19 policy.

Without much acknowledging the protests and while pretending that this was all its own idea, the Chinese leadership declared an end to many of the most burdensome elements of its COVID-19 policy, which has kept down the virus, as well as the Chinese people.

Lockdowns will become shorter and more targeted, and people who test positive for the coronavirus with mild symptoms can stay at home instead of being taken away to quarantine. Negative tests will no longer be routinely required in most public spaces. Cold medicines, whose sales had been curtailed so people couldn’t hide their COVID-19 symptoms, will be available again.

The government’s response, though, does not, of course, address the larger yearning for an end to autocracy.

Historically, popular protests in modern China have not resulted in more freedom but in less. In 1956, Mao Zedong decided to “let 100 flowers bloom” — but then was horrified when some of this intellectual blooming was critical of his rule. The upshot was a crackdown that sent some of my Chinese friends to labor camps for two decades.

In April 1976, a popular protest against the hard-liners led them to sack one of the reformers, Deng Xiaoping. In 1978 and ’79, calls on the “Democracy Wall” for greater freedom led to the imprisonment of activists like Wei Jingsheng.

Then the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement was a profound cry for greater freedom — and the result was a massacre, long prison sentences and the rise of hard-liners who have made the nation less free.

So it feels like a historic milestone that Xi was forced to bow to protests, but the easing may be costly.

Xi managed the pandemic adeptly for a time, reducing COVID-19 mortality to levels that almost any country would envy. Yet as vaccines became available, Xi didn’t adapt well. He didn’t import more effective mRNA vaccines from the West and didn’t sufficiently promote vaccinations and boosters for the vulnerable and elderly. He kept up the lockdown policy long after it was sustainable, partly because of the classic dictator’s difficulty in assessing the opinions of people when you imprison them for speaking up.

The upshot is that any rapid relaxation of COVID-19 rules today, without first raising vaccination rates among the elderly, may lead to hundreds of thousands of Chinese dying from COVID-19. That is on Xi.

Many years ago, when I was a Beijing correspondent for The New York Times, covering the Tiananmen protests, a young man put the nation’s aspiration this way: “We have rice, but we want rights.”

In the latest protests, slogans were similar: “We want freedom, not lockdowns. We want votes, not a ruler. We want dignity, not lies. We are citizens, not slaves.”

Someday the Chinese Communist leadership will have to respond to that very human aspiration. Xi may remain in charge, but a legacy of this year’s protests may be the reminder that this yearning still flickers, just beneath the surface, in the most populous nation on Earth.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

“The Russians promised it would be two or three weeks, and then the children would be back,” Nadia Borysenko, 29, told me. Her 12-year-old daughter, Daria, was among 25 children from this town in northeastern Ukraine who boarded a bus to the camp.

Russia did not return them, however. Daria and other children are now across the border in Russia, and Moscow is making it very difficult for families to recover their children.

The youngsters here are among many thousands of Ukrainian children whom Russia has taken from Ukraine and in some cases put up for adoption.

The Ukrainian government count is 11,461 children known by name and taken without families to Russia or Russian-controlled areas. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the Group of 20 summit that there are “tens of thousands” more who are known about only indirectly or with less detail.

“Among them are many whose parents were killed by Russian strikes, and now they are being held in the state that murdered them,” he said.

The transfer of thousands of children is a stark reminder that this is not a typical armed conflict. These may be war crimes. They should be a wake-up call to Americans and Europeans fatigued by support for Ukraine.

Do you really want to boost a state sponsor of child trafficking?

Russia doesn’t hide the transfer of Ukrainian children but trumpets it on its television propaganda programs, portraying itself as the savior of abandoned children and showing Russians handing teddy bears to Ukrainian boys and girls.

Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, boasted last month that she had adopted a Ukrainian boy, and many of these stolen children seem to have been adopted into Russian families.

That is not charity; it may be genocide. A 1948 international treaty specifies that “forcibly transferring children,” when intended to destroy a nationality, constitutes genocide.

Yet the situation is also nuanced. I reached Daria on her cellphone, and she didn’t sound like a traditional prisoner: She has friends, takes classes and can use her phone each evening to call her mom. But she unmistakably wants to go home to Ukraine.

“I miss home all the time,” she said.

Russian authorities allow parents to pick up their kids, but only by traveling to Russia through Poland and then other countries. That means that parents have to scramble to obtain passports and other documents — even as their homes and possessions may have been destroyed by Russian shells — and then take on a substantial expense just as the war has impoverished them. Some parents have managed to do this; most haven’t.

“Of course it’s a war crime when they take our children,” said Dementiev Mykola, a local prosecutor. “And they commit a crime by not making it easy for those children to come back.”

Mykola noted that the summer camp was attractive because it seemed the only way to keep kids safe from Russian shelling. He added that if the Russians wanted to, they could establish humanitarian corridors to repatriate children.

Another mother in Balakliya, Nadia Borysenko’s sister-in-law, Viktoria Borysenko, whose 12-year-old son, Bohdan, is at the camp, said he told her in phone calls that he and others are treated well but want to return. “They are crying and want to come home,” she said.

My best guess is that Russia takes the children to serve as props in its television propaganda shows. And afterward it doesn’t bother to return the props.

Many of the children taken to Russia were removed from institutions such as children’s homes, boarding schools and hospitals. Some of these youngsters didn’t have parents, but when they did, families were apparently not consulted.

Olena Matvienko told me that her 10-year-old grandson, Illya Matvienko, was in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol with his mother, Natalya, when both were badly injured by shrapnel. She died in front of Illya, and Russian troops took the boy not to a local hospital but to one in an enclave that Russian-backed separatists have declared the Donetsk People’s Republic.

The family had no idea what had happened to mother and son until a relative in Russia chanced to see a report on Russian television about heroic doctors in Donetsk saving Illya.

“He was kidnapped,” Matvienko told me. “He was taken forcibly.” She said that Russian authorities prepared papers so that Illya could be adopted in Russia.

To recover her grandson, Matvienko traveled through Poland and Turkey to Russia.

“It was just an accident that this video was seen and reached our family,” she said. “He would have been a Russian boy, and he would have grown up in another family.”

Children are not spoils of war. A government should not traffic in thousands of children. These elementary propositions underscore the moral stakes of the war in Ukraine, and it’s important for the world to stand firmly on the side of right — and to bring Daria home to her mom.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

Her voice cracked with emotion, but she held together until I asked what she thought of Americans who say it’s time to move on from supporting Ukraine.

“We’re people, you understand,” she said, and she began weeping. “It doesn’t matter if we’re Ukrainian or American — such things should not happen.” And then she was crying too hard to continue.

These areas in northeastern Ukraine, recently liberated after months of Russian occupation, show what’s at stake as some Americans and Europeans seek to trim assistance for Ukraine. There are bombed-out buildings, survivors cooking over open fires outside, children injured by land mines, freshly vacated Russian torture chambers — 23 discovered so far here in the Kharkiv region alone — along with mass graves of corpses with hands tied and shattered limbs.

While President Vladimir Putin of Russia seems unable to break the spirit of Ukrainians, he is already shattering the will of some Americans and Europeans.

“Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine,” says Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the firebrand Republican. The Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, says that it’s time to end the “blank check” for Ukraine.

The atrocities provide a moral reason to support Ukraine, but there’s also a practical reason to do so.

“Ukrainian resistance provides extraordinary security benefits to Americans,” noted Timothy Snyder, a Ukraine expert at Yale. “The least we can do is be on our own side.”

U.S. military planners have long worried about a Russian attack on Baltic countries in NATO. But at enormous cost in lives, Ukraine has so degraded Russia’s armed forces that the risk of that today is far lower.

Ukraine’s resistance may also increase the possibility that Putin himself will be toppled.

The most important way in which Ukraine is arguably making the world safer is farther to the east. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine, China could take that as a warning and be less likely to move on Taiwan, reducing the risk of a cataclysmic war between the United States and China.

A simple slogan captures the dynamic: “If Russia stops fighting, there will be no war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no more Ukraine.”

I’ll give the last word to Alla Kuznietsova, 52, a chatty woman who is a senior manager in the Izium gas bureau. She said she had secretly communicated Russian positions to the Ukrainian side during the occupation, at enormous risk.

In July, Russian troops arrested her and her husband for other reasons, including her tendency to speak openly around town about the prospect of liberation from Russian occupation. She said that for 10 days, she and her husband were held in separate cells on a Russian military base and subjected to electric shocks and repeated beatings with cables.

Kuznietsova said she was also repeatedly stripped naked and raped by interrogators and sexually humiliated in an attempt to break her spirit. That almost worked: At one despairing moment, she said, she tried to hang herself by her bra but failed.

In the end, the Russians caved first. They found that they needed her to run the town’s gas supply and told her that they would release her. “I said, ‘I will not leave without my husband,’” she recalled, so they freed her husband as well.

Instead of helping the Russians with the gas supply, Kuznietsova made a daring escape with her husband in the only direction possible: to Russia. She talked her way through checkpoints and then crossed into Estonia and finally traveled through Poland to Ukraine. She just returned to newly liberated Izium after a month of outpatient treatment in a Ukrainian hospital for her torture injuries.

I asked her about the West’s fatigue with the war.

Kuznietsovaseemed to struggle to come to grips with Americans’ fatigue with even a distant conflict. She told me she didn’t understand American elections, but her voice broke — in a way it did not when she recounted being beaten, shocked, raped and humiliated — as she expressed fear that the West might abandon Ukraine.

“We are grateful to Americans, but we just ask, please don’t leave us halfway,” she said. “Don’t leave us alone.”

This is Nicholas Kristof’s first column since returning to The New York Times after leaving in 2021 to run for governor of Oregon.

I’ve wondered about persuasion strategies, too, because I have friends who have their pro-Trump or anti-vaccine biases validated every evening by Tucker Carlson. So I reached out to an expert at changing minds.

Daryl Davis, 63, is a Black musician with an unusual calling: He hangs out with Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis and chips away at their racism. He has evidence of great success: a collection of KKK robes and hoods given to him by people whom he persuaded to abandon the Klan.

His odyssey arose from curiosity about racism, including about an attack he suffered. When Davis was 10 years old, he says, a group of white people hurled bottles, soda cans and rocks at him.

“I was incredulous,” Davis recalled. “My 10-year-old brain could not process the idea that someone who had never seen me, who had never spoken to me, who knew nothing about me, would want to inflict pain upon me for no other reason than the color of my skin.”

“How can you hate me,” he remembers wondering, “when you don’t even know me?”

Davis began to work on answers after he graduated from Howard University and joined a band that sometimes played in a Maryland bar that attracted white racists. Davis struck up a friendship with a KKK member, each fascinated by the other, and the man eventually left the KKK, Davis said.

One of Davis’ methods — and there’s research from social psychology to confirm the effectiveness of this approach — is not to confront antagonists and denounce their bigotry but rather to start in listening mode.

In one case, Davis said, he listened as a KKK district leader brought up crime by African Americans and told him that Black people are genetically wired to be violent. Davis responded by acknowledging that many crimes are committed by Black people but then noted that almost all well-known serial killers have been white and mused that white people must have a gene to be serial killers.

When the KKK leader sputtered that this was ridiculous, Davis agreed: It’s silly to say that white people are predisposed to be serial killers, just as it’s ridiculous to say that Black people have crime genes.

The man went silent, Davis said, and about five months later quit the KKK.

Davis claims to have persuaded some 200 white supremacists to leave the Klan and other extremist groups. It’s impossible to confirm that number, but his work has been well documented for decades in articles, videos, books and a TED Talk. He also has a podcast called “Changing Minds With Daryl Davis.”

I think that we Americans don’t engage enough with people we fundamentally disagree with. There’s something to be said for the basic Davis inclination toward dialogue even with unreasonable antagonists.

At a time when America is so polarized and political space is so toxic, we, of course, have to stand up for what we think is right. But it may also help to sit down with those we believe are wrong.

“If I can sit down and talk to KKK members and neo-Nazis and get them to give me their robes and hoods and swastika flags and all that kind of crazy stuff,” Davis said, “there’s no reason why somebody can’t sit down at a dinner table and talk to their family member.”

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

We no longer have a White House aide desperately searching for a fire alarm to interrupt a president as he humiliates our country at an international news conference, as happened in 2018. And a Pew Research Center survey found that 75% of those polled in a dozen countries expressed “confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing,” compared with 17% a year ago.

Yet in a larger sense, America is not back. In terms of our well-being at home and competitiveness abroad, the blunt truth is that America is lagging. In some respects, we are sliding toward mediocrity.

Greeks have higher high school graduation rates. Chileans live longer. Fifteen-year-olds in Russia, Poland, Latvia and many other countries are better at math than their American counterparts — perhaps a metric for where nations will stand in a generation or two.

As for reading, one-fifth of American 15-year-olds can’t read at the level expected of a 10-year-old. How are those millions of Americans going to compete in a globalized economy? As I see it, the greatest threat to America’s future is less a surging China or a rogue Russia than it is our underperformance at home.

We Americans repeat the mantra that “we’re No. 1” even though the latest Social Progress Index, a measure of health, safety and well-being around the world, ranked the United States No. 28. Even worse, the United States was one of only three countries, out of 163, that went backward in well-being over the last decade.

Another assessment this month, the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking 2021, put the United States No. 10 out of 64 economies. A similar forward-looking study from the World Bank ranks the United States No. 35 out of 174 countries.

So it’s great that we again have a president respected by the world. But we are not “back,” and we must face the reality that our greatest vulnerability is not what other countries do to us but what we have done to ourselves. The United States cannot achieve its potential when so many Americans are falling short of theirs.

“America’s chronic failure to turn its economic strength into social progress is a huge drag on American influence,” said Michael Green, chief executive of the group that publishes the Social Progress Index. “Europeans may envy America’s corporate dynamism but can comfort themselves that they are doing a much better job on a host of social outcomes, from education to health to the environment.

Biden’s proposals for a refundable child credit, for national pre-K, for affordable child care and for greater internet access would help address America’s strategic weaknesses. They would do more to strengthen our country than the $1.2 trillion plan pursued by American officials to modernize our nuclear arsenal. Our greatest threats today are ones we can’t nuke.

America still has enormous strengths. Its military budget is bigger than the military budgets of the next 10 countries put together. American universities are superb, and the dynamism of U.S. corporations is reflected in the way people worldwide use their iPhones to post on their Facebook pages about Taylor Swift songs.

But  American democracy was never quite as shimmering a model for the world as we liked to think, and it is certainly tarnished now.

We can’t control whether China builds more aircraft carriers. We can’t deter every Russian hacker.

But to truly bring America back, we should worry less about what others do and more about what we do to ourselves.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

The debate over whether to boycott the 2022 Beijing Olympics is heating up, for the Games open next February. The Biden administration says it is not currently discussing a boycott with allies, but 180 human rights organizations have jointly suggested one, and there are also discussions in Canada and Europe about whether to attend.

Olympic officials and business leaders protest that the Games are nonpolitical, but that is disingenuous. Of course they’re political. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is hosting the Olympics for political reasons, to garner international legitimacy even as he eviscerates Hong Kong freedoms, jails lawyers and journalists, seizes Canadian hostages, threatens Taiwan and, most horrifying, presides over crimes against humanity in the far western region of Xinjiang that is home to several Muslim minorities.

Here’s my bottom line: Athletes should participate and television should broadcast the competition, but government officials and companies should stay out of it. And I hope athletes while in Beijing will use every opportunity to call attention to repression in Xinjiang or elsewhere.

The blunt truth is that a much-watched Olympics give the world leverage to highlight human rights abuses and raise the cost of repression. We should use that leverage.

Full boycotts, as the United States pursued of the 1980 Moscow Games and Russia undertook of the 1984 Los Angeles Games, have largely failed. But a partial boycott, keeping officials and corporations away while sending athletes and fortifying them to speak up, can express disapproval while seizing a rare opportunity to highlight Xi Jinping’s brutality before the world.

Companies that have already paid for sponsorships of the Games would be losers, but that’s because they and the International Olympic Committee failed to push China to honor the human rights pledges it made when it won the Games. And in any case, a corporate association with what critics have dubbed the “Genocide Olympics” might not be such a marketing triumph.

“Instead of ‘higher, faster, stronger,’ what these companies are getting is ‘unjust incarceration, sexual abuse and forced labor,’” said Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch.

“There are a lot of tools beside a boycott,” Worden added. “The world’s attention is turning to Beijing, and the single greatest point of pressure on Xi Jinping’s China may be the Winter Olympics.”

In the 2006 Olympics, skater Joey Cheek used a news conference after he won a gold medal to call attention to genocide in Darfur; winning athletes next year could do the same for Xinjiang.

The IOC has tried to ban human rights symbols and gestures as un-Olympian, but that’s ridiculous. The most famous gestures in Olympic history came in 1968 when sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists in a Black power protest; denounced for years, they are now celebrated as moral leaders and have been inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame.

Athletes who wore “Save Xinjiang” or “End the Genocide” T-shirts next year might get into trouble with Olympic officials, but some day they, too, would be regarded as heroes.

Canadians are debating a boycott of the Games, but more could be accomplished if Canada resolved to send athletes and allowed them to wear shirts or buttons honoring the “Two Michaels” — Canadian citizens whom China has taken hostage and brutally mistreated. That might be more likely to free the men than any Canadian boycott.

The Olympics give us leverage. Instead of throwing it away, let’s make Xi Jinping fear every day how we might use it.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

Most historic in the package are provisions that should sharply reduce child poverty. If these measures are made permanent, a Columbia University study suggests, child poverty could fall by half. By half! Biden will have done for children something analogous to what Franklin Roosevelt did for older adults with Social Security.

This represents a revolution in American policy and a belated recognition that all society has a stake in investing in poor kids. To understand the returns that are possible, let’s look to lessons from halfway around the world.

Bangladesh was born 50 years ago this month amid genocide, squalor and starvation.

Back in 1991, after covering a cyclone in Bangladesh that killed more than 100,000 people, I wrote a bleak article for the New York Times suggesting that the country was “bountiful primarily in misfortune.” I was right that Bangladesh faces huge challenges, not least climate change. But overall, my pessimism was dead wrong, for Bangladesh has since enjoyed three decades of extraordinary progress.

Economic growth rates rose steadily, and for the four years before the current pandemic, Bangladesh’s economy soared by 7% to 8% per year, according to the World Bank. That was faster than China’s.

Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 72 years. That’s longer than in quite a few places in the United States, including in 10 counties in Mississippi.

What was Bangladesh’s secret? It was education and girls.

In the early 1980s, fewer than one-third of Bangladeshis completed elementary school. Girls in particular were rarely educated and contributed negligibly to the economy.

But then the government and civic organizations promoted education, including for girls. Today, 98% of children in Bangladesh complete elementary school. Still more astonishing for a country with a history of gender gaps, there are now more girls in high school in Bangladesh than boys.

“The most dramatic thing that happened to Bangladesh has to do with transforming the status of women, starting with the poorest women,” Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered microcredit in Bangladesh and elsewhere, told me. Yunus founded Grameen Bank, which turned women into entrepreneurs — nearly 100,000 became “telephone ladies” over four years, selling mobile phone services — in ways that helped transform them and their country.

Educated women also filled the ranks of nonprofits like Grameen and Brac, another highly regarded development organization. They got children vaccinated. They promoted toilets. They taught villagers how to read. They explained contraception. They discouraged child marriage.

The World Bank calls Bangladesh “an inspiring story of reducing poverty” — with 25 million Bangladeshis lifted from poverty over 15 years. The share of children stunted by malnutrition has fallen by about half in Bangladesh since 1991 and is now lower than in India.

In short, Bangladesh invested in its most underutilized assets — its poor, with a focus on the most marginalized and least productive, because that’s where the highest returns would be. And the same could be true in America. We’re not going to squeeze much more productivity out of our billionaires, but we as a country will benefit hugely if we can help the 1 in 7 American children who don’t even graduate from high school.

That’s what Biden’s attack on child poverty may be able to do, and why its central element, a refundable child tax credit, should be made permanent. Bangladesh reminds us that investing in marginalized children isn’t just about compassion, but about helping a nation soar.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

Yet this is the most wretched holiday season of my life. Consider:

• More Americans have died from COVID-19 in nine months than in combat over four years in World War II. The virus death toll exceeds 300,000, compared with 291,557 American World War II battle deaths.

• We’re sometimes now losing more Americans from the virus in a single day than perished in the Pearl Harbor attacks or 9/11.

• If American states were treated as countries, the places with the highest per capita coronavirus death rates would be: Slovenia, South Dakota, North Dakota, Bulgaria, Iowa, Bosnia, Hungary, Croatia, Illinois, North Macedonia, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, San Marino.

A pandemic is a test of a country’s governance, and this is one the United States has failed. Much of that is on President Donald Trump’s colossal failure of leadership, but it also reflects a deeper skepticism about science and a proclivity toward personal irresponsibility — such as refusing to wear masks.

America’s unraveling was captured by the video of a district health board meeting in Idaho a few days ago to discuss a mask mandate. One member, Diana Lachiondo, received an emergency call and frantically interrupted the discussion.

Her 12-year-old son and his 8-year-old brother were home alone (their grandmother had taken the dog on a walk) as armed protesters arrived, screaming, blowing air horns and calling their mom a tyrant — for trying to save people’s lives with face masks.

”There is an ugliness and cruelty in our national rhetoric that is reaching a fevered pitch here at home, and that should worry us all,” Lachiondo wrote later in a Facebook post. “And, above all, I am terrified about the virus’s current trajectory.”

She added: “I’m calling on Republican leaders who have politicized public health, who have amplified rhetoric, capitalized on it, tacitly endorsed it while holding hands with the most extreme factions in their party. Take a hard look at what you’ve become. It’s far past time to do better.”

Historically, national crises have always stressed the social fabric. The plague led to attacks on Jews and poor harvests set off witch trials. Today as well, too many politicians and ordinary Americans disdain science or any iota of personal responsibility, polarizing the country and misleading fellow citizens.

“Open America up,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., tweeted recently. “Masks don’t work,” said Ron Paul, the former Republican presidential candidate. Both these assertions defy science and public health recommendations; they are not just misleading but potentially lethal.

All this may worsen the pandemic.

Just as the Thanksgiving bump fades, I fear, the Christmas bump will arrive.

It’s not that the coronavirus can’t be controlled: Europe had a terrible autumn wave but reined in the virus — while keeping schools open. Yet the United States as a whole still can’t match Europe in rationally managing the virus. That goes back to weak American governance; if only Trump tackled a real virus as aggressively as he does fake electoral rigging.

“Most European countries are doing their best with government messaging, restrictions on hospitality and indoor house visits, testing, tracing, soft-touch border restrictions and face coverings, whereas the U.S. looks like a free-for-all,” said Devi Sridhar, an American who is a professor of global health at the University of Edinburgh. European countries have also put in place structures — universal health care, sick pay, free testing — that make it easier to address a crisis like this.

While Republicans have been particularly irresponsible in resisting face masks, it is mostly local Democratic officials who have irresponsibly kept schools closed more than necessary. As I’ve argued since May, that exacerbates inequality and learning gaps — without significantly curbing the virus.

“If the status quo continues, students of color stand to lose 11 to 12 months of learning by the end of the (school) year,” McKinsey & Co. warns in a new report. White students would be set back by less, four to eight months, it says.

The United States is also bungling the economic response. The nonprofit Feeding America warns that the pandemic could cause food insecurity to affect 1 in 4 American children, but Congress has been unable to pass an emergency bill to support those out of work.

Folks, we should be celebrating now. We have a new Pfizer vaccine that is 95% effective! Just behind it in the approval process is a vaccine from Moderna! By next summer, we should be able to emerge from our caves and hug each other again.

Except that by then hundreds of thousands of us will no longer be around.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children.

Yet America is shutting schools — New York City announced Wednesday that it was closing schools in the nation’s largest school district — even as it allows businesses like restaurants and bars to operate. What are our priorities?

“I have taught at the same low-income school for the last 25 years, and, truly, I can attest that remote schooling is failing our children,” said LaShondra Taylor, an English teacher in Broward County, Florida.

Some students don’t have a computer or don’t have Wi-Fi, Taylor said. Kids regularly miss classes because they have to babysit, or run errands, or earn money for their struggling families.

“The amount of absences is mind-blowing,” she said.

Adeola Whitney, chief executive of Reading Partners, an outstanding early literacy program, referred to the traditional “summer slide” in which low-income students lose ground during the summer months and told me: “The ‘summer slide’ is now being dwarfed by ‘COVID slide’ projections.”

Granted, the United States has done such a poor job of controlling the virus that as the pandemic rages across the country it may be necessary to shut some schools. But that should be the last resort.

I’ve been writing since May about the importance of keeping schools open, and initially the debate wasn’t so politicized. But after Trump, trying to project normalcy, blustered in July about schools needing to open, Republicans backed him, and too many Democrats instinctively lined up on the other side. Joe Biden echoed their extreme caution, as did many Democratic mayors and governors.

So Democrats helped preside over school closures that have devastated millions of families and damaged children’s futures. Cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., have closed schools while allowing restaurants to operate.

It’s true that Trump was simply trying to downplay the virus. If he wanted schools open, he should have fought the pandemic more seriously and invested federal money to help make school buildings safer against the virus’s spread.

Yet today, while we all want in-classroom instruction, the practical question is whether to operate schools that don’t have optimal ventilation and other protections. The United States has answered by shuttering many schools and turning to remote learning even as many businesses have stayed open or reopened.

Much of Europe pursued the opposite route, closing pubs and restaurants but doing everything possible to keep schools operating — and the evidence suggests that Europe has the smarter approach.

In both Europe and the United States, schools have not been linked to substantial transmission, and teachers and family members have not been shown to be at extra risk (this is more clear of elementary schools than of high schools). Meanwhile, the evidence has mounted of the human cost of school closures.

One child in eight in America lives with a parent with an addiction — a reflection of America’s other pandemic. I’ve seen kids living in chaotic homes, and for them the school building is a refuge and a lifeline.

America’s education system already transmits advantage and disadvantage from one generation to the next: Rich kids attend rich schools that propel them forward, and low-income children attend struggling schools that hold them back.

School closures magnify these inequities, as many private schools remain open and affluent parents are better able to help kids adjust to remote learning. At the same time, low-income children fall even further behind.

“Students are struggling,” Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, where more than four-fifths of students live below the poverty line, told me. “And if you’re not becoming proficient in reading in first, second, third grade, you may face a lifetime of consequences.”

McKinsey & Co. has estimated that in this pandemic, school closures may lead to 1 million additional high school dropouts.

Dropouts live shorter lives, so while the virus kills, so do school closures. One study this month estimated that closures of primary schools in the United States will cause many more years of life lost, because of increasing numbers of dropouts, than could be saved even if schools did spread the virus freely.

Let’s follow Europe: Close bars, and try harder to keep schools open.

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.