Like a Good Neighbor

This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine. To subscribe, click here .

A SPORTING GOODS store in a nearby town announced last week that it was closing, after many years of operation. Here’s why I think that matters, even amid all the rest.

Yes, we are living through a terrible moment in American (and planetary) history. Almost every day features two things: More cruel tweeting from the president, and more unsettling data from the real world. It is a bizarre and disheartening mix: record meanness and crudity, record windspeeds and temperatures.

We must resist, of course, and we are: The ongoing mobilization of people of good conscience is the one sweet thing about these past months. We look toward, among other things, the midterm elections as a moment when we might start to pull out of the nosedive. But resistance will not, even at its most successful, entirely erase our problems anytime soon. Long before Trump we were facing impossible inequality and impossible ice-melt. Along with resistance, we need ... neighbors.

Neighbors were optional for much of the last 50 years. We became hyper-individualists—surveys show that three-quarters of Americans have no relationship with their next-door neighbors, which is a novel situation for humans. But in the next 50 years, we’re going to need our neighbors again. The fat years are past and the lean years are upon us—even as we try to rebuild our planet against the predations of the rich and powerful, we’re going to require stronger communities for sheer survival. Ask the people trying to recover from Hurricane Harvey, from Maria, from the firestorm that raked California.

WHICH IS ONE reason we can’t keep sending our money off to Amazon. When we do, in search of a few dollars savings or a few minutes convenience, we further wreck the local economies that somehow survived the predations of Walmart. This second wave of local business destruction is even sadder than the first: One could argue that poor people had no choice but to frequent Walmart, but Amazon’s demographic is different. It’s almost by definition people with a choice.

No one ever met a new friend at Amazon. They may have read a thousand comments about some product at the bottom of a webpage, but that’s different. Being a good consumer is not what we need at the moment—what we need are good neighbors. People who will buy somewhat fewer items if that lets them shop locally. People who will spend the few minutes it takes to run an errand, rather than the few minutes it takes to log on, and then to check Twitter, and then to check Facebook, and then to ...

This may not seem like a grand gesture, one that can make a difference. And indeed it’s not as important, in the short run, as turning out voters for the next election, or rounding up protesters for the next march. But it does matter. People regularly ask me where they should go to survive climate change, and people regularly ask themselves where they should go to survive the new scary politics that haunts our lives. The answer, for those who can’t manage a move to New Zealand, is: anyplace with a strong community.

Good neighbors are the answer to many questions, so we should make sure we are.