Neighbors, whether we’re next door, in the same block, across the road, down the street, upstairs or downstairs, will most likely not share the same perspective on every matter. In fact, couples, co-workers, committee members, let’s just say, none of us, will always see things the same way.
It’s my opinion that most neighbors experience either literal or figurative boundary issues from time to time. However, most of us do not escalate to a real nineteenth century Hatfield and McCoy situation.
It might just be human nature to mark your territory, defend and protect it. Your “place” may be a humble piece of the earth or maybe it’s grand as grand can be. But it’s yours and you want the people around you to know it’s yours.
I’ve offended my neighbors and my neighbors have offended me. The awesome thing about “neighborliness” is that in time, we all chose to drop the offense and get on with life.
Because most tiffs just don’t matter that much in the scheme of things, we agreed to disagree on this issue or that, where we don’t see eye to eye. We still don’t see some things through the same lens, but we’ve agreed to overlook the offense of it and adopt an “it is what it is,” stance toward some things.
Speaking of not seeing eye to eye, there are terms in local ordinances, such as “annoys,” “offends decency,” or “offends senses,” which would seem difficult to legislate to a 21st century general population, in my estimation. I mean, something that annoys you, I may be able to overlook in favor of a personally more important sensibility. Something that I see as “common decency,” may be a cultural quirk of your subculture, and considered normal for you and yours.
I don’t speak lawyer-ese, nor am I trained to interpret the law but I am a half-decent cultural observer. It seems to me that the “common good,” of democracy where the majority rules, has been truly supplanted in this century by our republic’s concept of neighborliness.
What then, is neighborliness? Let me start with the biblical suggestion that one should “love your neighbor as yourself.” Even the disciples to whom Jesus directed this precept, asked “who is my neighbor?”
Basically, our neighbor is everybody. And, how do we love them as we love ourselves?
Well, you see, the Bible’s wisdom literature, which is loosely pretty much all of it, has an understanding of human nature well beyond most of our understanding. To love others as we love ourselves places us right where the rubber meets the road; at our own doorstep.
We fundamentally, base all of our understandings of others on how we think, feel, live and love. So, if you and I aren’t much alike, we’ll probably disagree with each other commensurate with how different we are. Therefore, the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is the best arbiter of how to treat others, and it demonstrates neighborliness.
Are you kind? Do you go out of your way to do something for someone else, unasked? Do you automatically help people? Can you respect someone else’s differences? Must your neighbor do things the way you do them, in order for you to consider them acceptable human beings?
“Your dog…no your dog…no your dog…”. Must little aggravations escalate? Do you really have room in your life to argue, fuss, and feud over this and that offense? Are your sensibilities so piqued that you can’t take a breath and concentrate on something else in your life for five minutes?
Is it necessary to take every offense to a lawyer or cite the ordinances that defend your offense, rather than move on and take care of your own life. Do you really have time to fight everything that doesn’t go your way?
If there isn’t a “grandfather clause” built into the ordinance by which you wish to defend your sensibilities, let’s pretend there is. Some of us lived with a bit looser interpretation of “what’s right,” way before the new ordinances came into existence.
We were freer. We were more casual. Fewer people cared about every jot and tittle. We left our neighbors be. We respected their right to live how they saw fit, keeping themselves to themselves. People were left to care for their “place” to the best of their ability, given the complications of their lives, which the rest of us may have known nothing about.
So, in the 1940s there was a Looney Tunes cartoon featuring the line, “that’s mighty neighborly of you.” I don’t know from whence I heard the saying, but apparently it stuck with me. I’m not that old. However, it is my sincere hope that we didn’t abandon neighborliness to history and instead, pick up the tone of it in the 2020s and beyond.
In between then and now, there was a pretty heinous cultural tone which may have been intended to defend one’s individual rights, but it served instead to promote selfishness, and the self-centered assertion of self above others. It was, “look out for number one.”
That assertion seems just plain icky to me, just reading it. Neighborliness, on the other hand is a much more genial show of friendly, kind, considerate, gracious and cordial character, worth emulating into the 21st century, don’t you think?