Being Neighborly

It's not just for Mr. Rogers.

Mr. Rogers with “Officer Clemmons.”

One Sunday evening about five years ago, Rafael and I were relaxing in our backyard hot tub, as we often do before bed. Suddenly, a band started playing a couple doors down. Our neighbors were having a party.

But it wasn’t just any party.

The music, coming from a brass-heavy band in their backyard, wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. As we listened to it, we finally settled on a genre: discordant clown punk mariachi. I couldn’t make out most of what I was hearing, but one song had so few words that I can remember them all: “Levanta la mano si te gusta marihuana” (“Raise your hand if you like marijuana”). The band was so hilariously bad that it was entertaining.

That house is known to us forever as the Clown Mariachi House.

The million or so people who seem to live in the Clown Mariachi House have always been great neighbors. Their parties have been infrequent, happening once or at most twice a year, and they’ve generally ended by 10 or 10:30. The one time we had to ask them to stop shouting over a megaphone late at night so we could sleep, they turned it down immediately.

When I ordered heavy furniture that was delivered to our sidewalk on a day when Rafael was away, a couple guys from the Clown Mariachi House helped me carry it inside. A few months ago, two women from the house rang our doorbell to let us know some cars had been stolen from the street. Someone is almost always hanging out in front when I walk by, and they always wave and say hello.

But the clown punk mariachi parties have become louder and more frequent. Last Sunday, a party started at 9:30. Rafael and I eventually tried to sleep, putting in ear plugs and closing the window despite it being a hot night. We could still hear the band loud and clear. Finally, we went over there at 11:15, in our pajamas, to ask them to turn it down. A younger woman I hadn’t seen before came to meet us at the gate to the backyard. When we shouted at the top of our lungs, so she could have any chance of hearing us over the band, that we were trying to sleep, she threw her hands in the air and shouted back, “What do you want me to do?” The party continued, full-blast, till around midnight.

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Maybe this was an anomaly. Maybe it won’t happen again. But it feels like just another part of a trend that I’m seeing everywhere. July 4th fireworks have become louder and ubiquitous. Drivers have become more rude and inconsiderate. Sideshows have spread from our nearby Oakland corner to more tony Pacific Heights and Marin County.

As I wrote last week, there’s a trend of elevating the rights of individuals over any responsibility to our communities — even if it’s just the right to make a lot of noise in the name of enjoyment. Being neighborly is only where it starts, but neighborhoods serve as a microcosm of the larger issue.

Fireworks, crazy driving, and sideshows, though potentially dangerous, are mostly annoying. But the same trend extends beyond our neighborhoods, raising the stakes much higher.

Take covid. The neighborly thing would be for people to continue wearing masks in public places — or, at the very least, not to bully people who do. Instead, many people have disregarded the health of others — sometimes even coughed in their faces on purpose — all in the name of freedom. Meanwhile, the pandemic continues. Over 7 million people had died of covid globally as of mid-April, over 1 million in the U.S. As of March, 6.8% of adults in the U.S. — 17.6 million Americans — were experiencing some form of long covid.

Some of these deaths and illnesses couldn’t have been avoided, but many could have. That would have taken a different approach by governments around the world (including dispensing better information, recommending longer quarantines, and enacting extended mask mandates), but a sense of community and neighborliness would have helped governments adopt the right measures.

The trend can also be seen in the oft-cited increasing divisiveness in our country. It can be seen in the lack of coordinated action on climate change. It can be seen in the increasing xenophobia around the world.

Where does it come from? One contributor is late-stage capitalism, which I know I bring up a lot; it’s anathema to a Flower Child like myself. This system has created a sense of scarcity, making everyone think they’re in a zero-sum game. If we’re all competing for scarce resources, it’s hard to feel like part of a community.

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With little sense of community in our culture, it’s not surprising that neighborliness is on the wane. Despite our recent Sunday experience, the Clown Mariachi House usually embodies a more neighborly, community-minded way of being, which I appreciate. But they’re outliers. Most people in our neighborhood keep to themselves at best, though they’re friendly enough when you encounter them. At worst, there’s the excessive fireworks and sideshows (though in fairness, the sideshow attendees are mostly from other towns).

This lack of neighborliness makes our communities less pleasant to live in, but the ramifications are much more serious. As climate change worsens and food supply chains are disrupted, we’re going to need our communities more than ever. What will it take to reverse this disturbing unneighborly trend?

When my ex-husband and I lived on Valencia Street in the Mission, there was an evangelical storefront church under our apartment. We heard them speaking in tongues many times, a creepy sound to seep through your floorboards as you’re sitting on the couch trying to read. That didn’t dispose us in their favor, but after the 1989 earthquake, we suddenly felt a kinship with them. We didn’t become friends, but we interacted with them in an authentic way for the first time. We were all in this together.

Will it take serious calamities to increase neighborliness in our communities, and in our country? I suspect it will. When that call comes, I hope we’ll be ready to heed it.