This blog is by Chris Green, KLC Case Writer and former Topeka Statehouse reporter.
At one level, a recent story about a bitter, long-running feud among neighbors in a Sunday edition of The Wichita Eagle was unfathomable to me. How is this possible, I wondered, for such animosity to be built up and sustained over time?
Then I started thinking my own little corner of the world in Topeka. Each day, dozens of little things happen that could be sources of conflict among neighbors.
I’ve seen a handful of neighbors leave the snow on their front sidewalks unshoveled. At one house around the corner, a parked car occasionally blocks the sidewalk, forcing me to step around it as I walk my dog in the mornings.
When I encounter such things, I may be a little irritated for a moment or two but then I just move on. After all, life is too short and in the grand scheme of things, these are just small, easily forgivable inconveniences.
However, over the years in places where I’ve lived, I’ve also seen small things build up over time. Neighbors grow angry at one another and choose up sides. They may stop speaking to each other. People begin drawing battle lines over ordinarily mundane matters.
The truth is that living in proximity to others produces conflict. Each day, we interact with those who have different sets of values than we do. Sometimes those conflicts build up into uncomfortably heated situations.
As painful as those instances can be, they can also be an opportunity to exercise leadership and build new, more productive understandings with our neighbors. The catch is that the activity of leadership starts with a personal intervention, something that we try as individuals to help make progress on a daunting problem.
So, I’m curious: If a conflict of this nature happened in your neighborhood, would you intervene? What would you do and why?
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That’s awful. I like to think that disputes like this could be solved with plain ol’ honesty and listening. I’d at least try if that were going down in my ‘hood.
Sigh. You hope people will take to heart the admonishion to Love Thy Neighbors As Thyself. But I have had neighbor troubles, including a strange man who kept wandering into my yard. I called the cops in that case. Other neighbors routinely let their dogs relieve themselves by my mail box. So I put up a sign that said, “I LOVE DOGS! (But not their poop by my mailbox, please.) It stopped. In one seriously unpleasant case, another neighbor was circulating flyers about a child molester in our midst, in the home of one of my other neighbors who I know well. I investigated the actual facts, court records, etc., and passed along facts in conversation to others to counteract the nasty rumors. No one wants open warefare with their neighbors, and I think people shouting ugly things is beyond the pale and frankly not sure what I would do beyond avoidance.
Polly – that reminds me of the several instances of bad neighbors I had growing up (also, I’m certain our family had been culprits as well). Once, at around age 10, my family was sitting out on the street watching fireworks go off from downtown. Our neighbor who we barely new came out and told us that they they called the cops because we were looking at their house for a long time.
Really? Do we look like robbers?
I think most of our problems with neighbors came through lack of patience, communication and willingness to bring up issues that annoyed us productively.