I came home from work the other day to find a friendly neighbour from two doors down (I think), armed with a giant leaf-blower, busily fwooshing a pile of autumn's detritus off my front lawn and to the curb. I believe this to be the same man responsible for the snowbanks abutting my driveway on either side, with bare pavement between, in the dead of winter.
I thanked him quite heartily. Raking and, for that matter, shovelling) have never been favourite tasks chez Breadbin. Your host is not what you'd call an outdoor kind of guy. At any rate, my neighbour waved off my thanks and zigzagged back to his own house, fwooshing leaves all the way, and that was the end of it. I don't know his name. I'm not completely certain where he lives. And I hate to admit this, but I'm not keen to find out either of those details. My wife would like to gift him with some of her homemade chocolates, and I can get behind that sentiment, but--count me among those who think good fences make good neighbours.
And then I think 'how can I think that?'
"No man is an Island", wrote John Donne, and that was true enough in his time. But he's been dead and gone 375 years, and the world has moved on. Most of us are islands now, in a vast archipelago of urbanized, mechanized, privatized and sanitized humanity. We've gathered together in enormous clumps, then sought apartness by erecting emotional and spiritual walls wherever we can. It is the chief irony of our age that our communities have never been so large and so small at once. Many of us are insulated (insulate: from the Latin insulare, 'to make into an island') from family, from friends, and certainly from the faceless hordes that live among us.
There are still small-town and rural pockets of familiarity, places where the word 'stranger' still carries the connotation of 'friend I haven't met yet', but they are increasingly rare. Even in small town Canada, you may be greeted warmly, but in most places you're considered foreign until you've lived there a decade or longer. And small towns are inherently xenophobic.
Our society functions on fear the same way it functions on bullshit. We're afraid of germs, the exposure to which will boost our immune system; we're afraid of terrorists despite long odds we'll never actually see one. The papers tell us violent crime is down forty seven percent; no matter, our fear of same is up four hundred percent. Would we collapse out of sheer boredom if we forswore all that fear, I wonder? It turns out most of the fear is bullshit, but don't let that stop you from being afraid.
In this environment, it's no surprise most of us are suspicious of, well, most of us. A random act of kindness can't be random and probably isn't kind at all: there must be something in it for him and worse: now what exactly am I obligated to do?
Even something so innocent as a smile and a hello, in our larger urban centres, is regarded as just a touch insane. Try it the next time you find yourself on a downtown corner. Put a big smile on your face and brightly say hello to somebody you've never seen in your life. I used to do it all the time...purely for scientific purposes, you understand.
What I've found is that about a third of people will ignore me. You can tell they've heard the greeting: they hunch down into themselves in response and hurry by. Most of the rest, call it six in ten, will mumble hello in return and then pick up their pace. Only about one in ten will return my greeting with anything close to the enthusiasm I put into it, and very few of them will take the next step in the dance of human greeting, the one called 'how are you?' (You know that one. The standard response is 'not too bad', as if to say, 'well, bad, but not too bad'...and no matter what you say to it, your rejoinder will go unheard. Here's another social experiment. Next time somebody asks you how you are, say 'pretty bad'. But do it in the same tone of voice you'd say 'not too bad' in. And see if they notice. I've give you even money they don't.)
I have to say, even when I'm deep in the experiment and I initiated the contact, a stranger asking me how I am kind of creeps me out a bit. Isn't that odd?
It's a weird, wierd world we're a-building.
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