Good Neighbors, No Politics - New York Times
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Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
NASHVILLE — A few years ago an app surfaced on Facebook that could identify how many of your friends were liberal and how many were conservative. One of my real-life friends clicked the button to see how her Facebook list stacked up and was shocked by the result. “I had no idea I liked so many Republicans,” she said.
No wonder she was surprised. Facebook is very, very good at tracking our political leanings — and at serving up more of what it has decided we want. So we interact online with like-minded people far more than we do with those whose views we find objectionable. And online it’s easy for a heated exchange, or even a sorry joke, to end with the unfriend button. A recent study in The American Journal of Political Science concluded that in terms of political identity, “the polarization of the American electorate has dramatically increased.” The article is titled “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines.”
Maybe that’s true on Facebook, but are the lines really so clear in ordinary life? People aren’t simply their political opinions, not even the most deeply held and sacred ones. Surely we are all so much more than the shrill conversation online implies.
Twenty-one years ago, my husband and I bought our house here, in what was Nashville’s answer to Levittown — a circle of small, plain, matching houses built for young families buying their first homes thanks to the G.I. Bill. Once the original homeowners began to cash out and head to retirement communities, young families like ours moved in, and things started to look the way they surely did back in the ’50s. Children race through the half-acre yards in half-feral packs, climbing back fences and low-branched trees as hide-and-seek gives way to flashlight tag in the failing light.
With one family’s oldest child best-friending another family’s youngest, relationships continue to spread and deepen even as new families move in and a younger crew replaces the kids now old enough to drive. My own children are mostly grown now, and I don’t know my younger neighbors as well as I know the parents of the children who grew up with mine, but I know they are still calling one another to ask: “Are the kids in your yard? Did they say where they were going?”
That’s how friendships, not “friend”-ships, are formed.
Most of my children’s packmates have left for college, but you’ll still find me standing in the street with their mothers, or sitting with them on the porch, or carpooling with them to the closest taco place. We talk about what all longtime friends discuss: our aging parents, books and sex and movies and bras and all the ways we’ve embarrassed our kids lately.
What we don’t ever talk about is politics. But it’s not as if we don’t all know where we stand. During the last election, when canvassers from the beleaguered Tennessee Democratic Party were making the rounds, several neighbors pointed them toward our house. When one of them arrived, he said, “You’re the token liberals around here, I guess.”
We aren’t actually the only liberals here, but political leanings are beside the point on this little block. Knowing our neighbors’ party affiliations would tell you nothing about which one of them makes a killer margarita, or which one volunteers at a homeless shelter, or which one secretly hung a lime-green thong on the back side of a neighbor’s Christmas tree after the caroling party.
For more than two decades we have fed one another’s dogs and watered one another’s tomatoes and seen one another through every struggle imaginable: infertility and childbirth and postpartum depression and infidelity and divorce and troubled teenagers and dying parents and medical crises and, by far the most devastating of all, the loss of a child. Is there any difference at the ballot box that could even touch what it means to clutch a friend in the street, wailing, or to text in the middle of the night, grieving in the dark?
Our votes may cancel out, but we belong to one another. Years ago one of my neighbors tried to tell his wife that it would make more sense to move out than to add a second story onto the 65-year-old foundation of their house. Her response: “The only way I’m leaving this neighborhood is in a box.”
This summer Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg caused a little uproar when she joked about moving to New Zealand if Donald Trump were elected, but we all know she isn’t going anywhere. Divisions in this country are genuine and deep, and the consequences of this election will be huge and far-reaching, but our nation is still our neighborhood in the end, and we’re a lot better at getting along than it sometimes seems.
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