"Good fences make good neighbors." So states Robert Frost's neighbor in his unforgettable "Mending Wall." If true, then what makes a good fence? And who is my neighbor?
Romantics among us may claim that a good fence is no fence, that we need no walls for human connection. They're not even natural. Nowadays with increasing extreme weather, nature insists on dislodging walls. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall/That wants it down."
But there's no inherent wrong in building fences. They offer privacy and protection, just as we each need boundaries to demarcate our uniqueness. The poem's Spring mending ritual is an opportunity for the two neighbors to engage each other. Because of the wall, they interact.
Yet be careful. Our fences must not seal us off from each other. These are bad fences, and bad fences make for bad neighbors. When our fencing IN is a fencing OUT, neighborhoods exude a dark side. In his Building Resistance, Purdue political scientist Daniel Aldrich describes how, after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, neighborhood councils in Tamil Nadu, India, distributed aid among their communities but doled out little to women (especially widows), Dalits ("untouchables"), and Muslim inhabitants.
We all have neighbor tales. Note the Cranston, R.I., neighbor who placed this illiterate sign on his garage door with a Christmas wreath after hearing that his neighbor with whom he had been feuding has Hodgkin's lymphoma: "Glad you have canser. So die stupid."
Disaster, collective and individual, does not fence out. People do.
Now who is my neighbor? While "neighbor" etymologically refers to those who "dwell near," my neighbor also lives beyond, as in the Gospel of Luke's "Good Samaritan" (Luke 10:25-37). In New Orleans, more affluent, tight-knit communities resisted having vitally needed FEMA trailers for others in their neighborhoods, slowing down recovery for the region. Bad fences spawn this "not in my backyard" mindset. Whereas bad fences turn neighbors into gatekeepers, good fences neither seal in nor out. As my friend Seamus Hodgkinson puts it, "Walls have doors."
Often in disasters, it's neighbors who rise to the occasion in the face of official incompetence and callousness. But beyond this initial surge of altruism, then what? In his work, Aldrich also offers a startling contrast between two New Orleans neighborhoods "recovering" from Hurricane Katrina. Both areas had similar damage, poverty rates, and lack of government assistance. The Lower Ninth Ward, with not even 35 percent of its population returned, still looks devastated. Village de L'Est's Mary Queen of Vietnam community now thrives, with repopulation and business recovery rates of 90 percent.
What accounts for their difference in recovery? "Social capital" says Aldrich, a community's degree of social networking and bonding, what I prefer to think of as social cohesion that cultivates trust through interpersonal, face-to-face connectedness and genuine neighborliness.
True neighbors share a moral bond with place and with each other while respecting our need for boundaries that both distinguish and connect. Yet we still build bad fences: generational isolation, civic segregation, suburban banality, impersonalism, and die-hard incivility. Immersed in our subjectivities and uncurbed by responsibility to the whole, we remain separate islands that touch each other only at the surface. In the U.S., social capital is dying, and, as in the title of Robert Putnam's eye-opening book, we are Bowling Alone.
Rest assured, there will be more storms ahead. How socially cohesive are we? Are we good neighbors? Luke's Gospel (10:27), "Love thy neighbor as thyself" remains a command, not a suggestion. The litmus test of "good neighbor" lies in how we treat those on the margins and the disinherited. Ultimately, building good fences comes down to what we give of ourselves.
Michael Brannigan is the Pfaff Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Values at The College of Saint Rose. Email: michael.brannigan@strose.edu. Website: michaelcbrannigan.com