"I'm trying to get people to care about a crisis in ways that may bring solutions to it. And that's also how I deal with the terror and the fear to find a sense of purpose in what I do. It's incredibly heartbreaking to see some of the things and hear some of the stories, but at the end of the day, it feels like–inconsistently here and there–you can shine a light on problems, and by shining that light, you actually make a difference.
I was the Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times and had covered the Tiananmen democracy movement. It had seemed so full of hope, but that terrible night, I heard that the troops were busting through student lines and headed toward Tiananmen. I rode my bike and got to Tiananmen Square a little bit before the troops did. And then they arrived and opened fire on the crowd that I was in. I was terrified. To watch a modern army turn weapons of war on unarmed protesters—that changes you. Frankly, at first, I was a little bit disdainful of some of the less educated protesters at Tiananmen, and I wrote periodically that although they say they're for democracy, they can't define the kind of democracy they're in favor of. That night, though, it was those uneducated workers and peasants who were driving their rickshaws out whenever there was a pause in the firing to pick up bodies of kids who'd been killed or injured, who blocked the troops. One bus driver saw troops coming in trucks, so he parked his bus across the road to keep the trucks away and turned off the engine. Then when the officer pointed his firearm at him and demanded he move the bus, he just hurled the keys into the high grass. People like that might not have been able to define democracy, but they were willing to risk their lives for it. And I think there's a lot we can learn from the courage and commitment of people like that whom I witnessed in June 1989."

Nicholas D. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist and Op-ed columnist for The New York Times, where he was previously bureau chief in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. Kristof is a regular CNN contributor and has covered, among many other events and crises, the Tiananmen Square protests, the Darfur genocide, the Yemeni civil war, and the U.S. opioid crisis. He is the author of the memoir Chasing Hope, A Reporter's Life, and coauthor, with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, of five previous books: Tightrope, A Path Appears, Half the Sky, Thunder from the East, and China Wakes.

www.nytimes.com/column/nicholas-kristof
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/720814/chasing-hope-by-nicholas-d-kristof

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