A good neighbor is worth their weight in gold. They are someone you can rely on, who has your back, and will occasionally be willing to put up with your stupid mistakes when they get out of hand. Everyone knows that much from years of sitcoms like Home Improvement, The Andy Griffith Show, and Full House, but in the real world we have to remember that a relationship like that can’t be a one way street or the whole neighborhood falls apart. To be a thriving community means that no one member can be the boss (at least not all the time) and everyone plays a part in improving life for the whole. Everybody has to lend a hand and everybody benefits from the arrangement. This is not to be confused with the idea of communism, which is a system in which a group of idiots take power and tell all the other members to shut up while they run everything into the ground then blame others for not trying hard enough.
Refocusing on my description of what a community is, there’s probably a handful of readers who’ve lived in a community they like for a long time who will get what I’m talking about. Most good neighbors are polite and willing to go a little bit out of their way to help one another, eventually becoming friends even if they aren’t the closest people in the world. If one person’s house burns down their neighbors will hopefully at the very least be willing to help the victims flee from the building, try to put out the fire, and call the fire department. Sure, the burning house isn’t the neighbor’s property and its residents probably aren’t blood relatives, but that doesn’t mean the people next door to the burning building are just going to put their own time and well-being first and let the tragic circumstances of a house fire play out without trying to help. The understanding that human lives have a greater value than earthly possessions or our comfort is why volunteer fire departments exist, why younger people will shovel their elderly neighbors’ driveways after a major snow storm, and why my environmental science class in high school spent a morning pulling invasive plants out of one of the banks of the Horicon Marsh. For the sake of the whole, an individual or group of individuals should be willing to withstand a little discomfort without seeking compensation. I’m not the first person to think this lesson is important – not by a long shot! Christians have long taught that charity is one of the greatest signs of authentic faith since it follows the example set by Jesus Christ. Other religions such as Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism also speak of charity as an important trait in a believer, so it’s not like you can object to helping your fellow man on religious grounds. Sometimes charity takes the form of money, other times it takes the form of skills and knowledge one party has that another doesn’t. My dad’s helped answer more than a few wiring questions for people, and a recently-passed neighbor was kind enough to share his garden back in the day. We were also kind enough to forgive him for doing yard work without a shirt despite being a seventy-plus year old man, so it all balanced out in the end.
So far this all probably seems too simple and surface-level for something I would decide to spend my time writing about. What’s the catch? Where will I suddenly turn it all around and reveal a big twist? There’s a twist coming, don’t you worry, but I don’t think it’s really that big. All of what I’ve said so far is based on how I really think we should treat our neighbors. Good neighbors are good to each other, but it has to be a two-way street. If you want to have good neighbors, you have to be a good neighbor, and sometimes that means being a good neighbor to someone who seems determined to be a bad one. If your neighbor is a jerk, don’t be a jerk back and give them the validation of thinking they were right to treat you poorly. Killing them with kindness, a common bit of advice that can seem like a load of hogwash when dealing with an unpleasant person in real life, is actually pretty smart. No one likes to think of themselves as the problem when there’s an argument or disagreement, so we’ll look for something to justify how we treat others. It’ll feel justified to hate someone because they might have said something about our family or not kept a promise. That’s where killing someone with kindness and loving your neighbor more than they love you comes into play; the less fuel you give their arguments justifying their anger at you, the harder it becomes for that anger to sustain itself. Outside observers will also be less likely to see you as the problem, which is great. Either a bad neighbor will eventually warm up to you and become a good one or at the very least you won’t look like a jerk. Are you still following my logic? Good; here’s where the not-so-big twist comes in. Who, if you’d be so kind as to think about it, counts as your neighbor?
Biblically speaking, the definition of a neighbor seems to extend to all human beings regardless of actual physical proximity. That’s nothing new. It’s a sentiment literally older than the English language, and it’s more or less a declaration that empathy is a virtue. Caring about people you’ve never met is the basis of charities, kind gestures like the relationship between the Irish people and the Choctaw nation, food banks, blood banks, and toy drives. Now here’s another little twist to the message I’ve been sharing so far – who says loving your neighbor is a sentiment that only applies to individuals? Charities are often a collection of individuals giving their own resources to help someone or a group of someones, but now imagine that it’s not just a collection of individuals who are giving. Imagine it’s a collective or an organization doing the giving. What if a neighborhood (what else would you call a group of neighbors?) was to reach out and help another neighborhood? When wildfire struck the Hawaiian island of Maui last year there were fundraisers popping up across America to help them rebuild. The aforementioned bond between the Irish and the Choctaw was forged when two groups of people who were suffering took the time to try and lessen each others pain. These are examples of neighborhoods acting as good neighbors. It’s a good example and a great lesson in how you can help others in order to help even more people, but it’s only the start of where I’m taking this. That’s right, I’m still not done turning the tables on you, and I’m about to drop the final piece into place that I’ve been hiding behind my back since the first paragraph. Remember how I said all that stuff about being a good neighbor even when you’re dealing with a bad one? How I said all that stuff about killing them with kindness and perhaps one day turning a bad neighbor into a good one? Combine that with my ideas about neighborhoods acting like neighbors and ask yourself the following:
If “love thy neighbor” applies to more than just individuals, does it also apply to nations?
One of the most common complaints I’ve heard about American politics the past few years is that we’re sending too much money to support other countries like Taiwan or Ukraine when that money could go toward fixing roads or lowering taxes. Things in several of the fifty states are less than spectacular: the roads are crap, the schools are outdated, the water in many communities is downright toxic, and in popular tourist spots like Hawaii the local population is living in extreme poverty right next to luxury hotels. Why should we spend money on people out there when there’s so much suffering right here? Then there’s all those problems at the border, where people from Venezuela, Mexico, and who knows where else are flaunting the proper process and illegally entering the USA. Why should we open the doors wide and welcome in strangers and refugees from places like Haiti or Afghanistan when their home countries seem to be falling apart on the news? I’ll tell you why – they’re our neighbors. The goal of a neighbor isn’t to make their house the best while leaving everyone else to rot, it’s to find a way to make everyone’s lives better. Even if it means giving up something of your own, being a neighbor means being a shoulder to lean on when your fellow man has been hurt. The Good Samaritan story is an example of this, where a traveler from a culture that considered Samaritans to be inherently inferior and sinful was saved by a Samaritan who’d never met the traveler before. I’ve read my family’s histories and I am fully aware that my ancestors were poor immigrants. The country they came from (the Netherlands) was only able to regain its freedom from foreign occupation by the Germans in World War II with foreign aid. Why were we as a nation so willing to do such things in the past but so set against it in the present day?
I’m not trying to convince all of you to send everything you have to a foreign government or to open the border to anyone who wants to pass through. The core of my message is that every human being is your neighbor. Neighbors don’t always get along, but they’re supposed to help each other. That can mean volunteering at a charity, helping an elderly person down the block with their groceries, or finding room in the budget to aid your fellow man or the time to actually fix the border instead of complaining about it. Doing any of those things is a way of doing the Lord’s work. What we do with our neighbors is our choice to make, but it reflects on us. Let’s make good choices.
The Archivist's Pen 