It’s peaceful these days in our neighborhood on the edge of the farms and rolling hills of Rensselaer County, but last summer was a doozy. The kids whose family moved into a house down the hill were buzzing around on dirt bikes – just about driving us nuts from the noise. My wife teaches online and does a podcast from her home studio, and I’ll tell you that a lesser person would have become, you know, grouchy.
To avert that quite understandable impulse, my ever-cheerful spouse – no, of course I’m not being sarcastic! – walked down the street to talk with the teenagers. That yielded no peace, so she brought out the big guns: She called their mom.
But, you know, that’s how my own parents dealt with the conflicts that inevitably arise when people live near each other. Along Maywood Drive in the little midwestern city where I was born, neighbors talked with each other to resolve their problems.
These days, though, we’re more likely to just stew in frustration and grow angry. That’s no wonder, because for most of us, the people down the street are strangers. A Pew study a few years back found that only about a quarter of Americans know most of their neighbors. People in rural areas are more likely to know their neighbors, but they’re no more likely than people in cities and suburbs to actually interact with them.
I’d say that at least some of the hostility we routinely witness in America – road rage, online hate, violence in the streets – may be blamed on simple unfamiliarity. It’s harder to be unkind to people you know, after all.
It’s not that we can expect to always get along. We never have. Thoreau sought isolation at Walden Pond in part because he didn’t like the people around him. He complained, “We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.” That’s what Thoreau said.
And actually, if we do meet the neighbors, we may these days be less likely to find ourselves at odds with them than we expect, because recent years have seen Americans cluster ever more closely with people more like themselves.
That is, more than a half-century after the Fair Housing Act banned discrimination based on race, religion, national origin or sex, we still live mostly in communities that are racially and socially segregated. And a growing phenomenon is partisan clustering: A new study finds that many voters live in neighborhoods so politically separated that only one encounter in 10 is likely to be with somebody from the other political party.
This self-segregation robs us of the chance for understanding that can arise from the kind of daily interactions that might be called the democracy of everyday life – that is, borrowing a shovel, getting help to push a car out of a snowdrift, watering a houseplant when a neighbor is away, kids playing with kids from down the street.
That’s the stuff of real life. We all have good days and bad days, strengths and weaknesses, but we get along better if we accept in others the fallibilities that we must be honest enough to see in ourselves. Oh – and we have to yield ground sometimes to find a common space where there’s room for us all.
And, by the way, that’s exactly how American politics used to work – before we got so angry and so aggrieved by life’s challenges that we had to find somebody else to blame.
But sometimes, trying to find common ground works. Take the mom of those kids on the noisy bikes. She told us that she wasn’t about to ask her teenagers to give up the bikes – that it was their right to ride them around. But just as we were itching to get really annoyed, she said that she would ask her sons to use the noisy bikes only for about an hour a day, and to avoid the dinner hour and the time my wife is recording her podcast. It’s not all that we might have hoped. But it shows that somebody cares about being a neighbor.
That’s about all we can hope for. And it’s how we might wish our political system still worked. For starters, it seems, we would have to take a few steps down the street and talk with each other.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.