NEIGHBORHOOD
An appeal to our shared humanity
To whoever put me on a neighborhood watch list,
You got yourselves worked up over a guy who takes pictures of leaves.
Fall is my favorite season, and I like to walk around and look at the trees every year. I never get tired of seeing all the colors. To me, it is like the stained glass in nature’s cathedral. If you are who I think you are, then you also live across the street from a house I stayed in for my first year on Earth. I don’t even remember living in “the baby house,” as my parents always called it, but it’s only three miles away. I hadn’t seen it in years, and Fall always makes me feel nostalgic, so I parked and walked around the old neighborhood taking photos, enjoying a beautiful morning.
A few days later, my mom asked me if I had been out walking somewhere. She is on a group text with her neighborhood association where the old ladies are always clucking about something or other, and one of them recognized my picture on a local watch list and said she thought people were too paranoid nowadays.
Now, no harm has come of this. Nobody has kicked in my front door or kidnapped me from my job. I say I’ve been “micro-Karened” because I haven’t been arrested, manhandled, or shot and killed. Many people who get Karened are not so lucky.*
* My apologies to my friend Karin, a warm-hearted person who has been a little miffed ever since her namesake became synonymous with racism. I use the term to goose the reader and also because it gets the point across in one word.
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Still, it troubles me to get put on a watch list when I didn’t do anything wrong. Part of the essence of Karening people is that the recipient has not actually committed any specific offense, but is nevertheless still treated as a “suspicious person.” In many cases, this boils down to melanin, a nervous older white lady not liking the look of an American person with brown skin. In the UK, they call these people “curtain-twitchers,” which is a fun visual.
I remember a family of four gathering in their yard, talking in raised voices among themselves and giving me ugly looks. I waved, and they didn’t wave back, so I walked away, got in my car and left.
To be charitable, I don’t know what all might have happened in the neighborhood leading up to that. Maybe there have been burglaries, or car theft, or vandalism, and that is what had you on the alert. But I wasn’t doing any of that. I was taking an easy stroll in broad daylight at 9 in the morning on Sunday, being careful not to step in people’s yards and looking both ways for cars when I crossed the street. You are telling people to look out for a nerd who loves nature. You might as well put someone on a watch list for looking at Christmas lights.
I could have explained all this well enough if anyone had asked me. But no one did. This is sadly becoming the default these days. Security cameras have become more inquisitive than people. Instead of starting a conversation to find out more about a person, we just call in some shadowy goon squad to make them disappear and suffer. I don’t believe in that. I don’t like this rude, aggressive, hostile, paranoid culture of pre-emptively imprisoning strangers, violating their human rights and silencing their voices. It is poison. I think we can do better.
My concern is not my immediate physical safety today, but what this habit leads to. It creates the police state we now live in, where military-industrial psychopaths profit from putting human beings in cages for being different.
I do know that if the roles had been reversed, I would have waved back and said “good morning.” I would have lobbed some easy starters about “aren’t these leaves gorgeous,” how I love to walk and take photos too, “do you live nearby,” and so on — pleasantries that let me find out more about someone instead of pre-judging and pre-emptively shunning them.
Maybe there is a language barrier that made it harder for you to do that. If you are who I think you are, then I remember you looking Latino and speaking Spanish. In a different context, I might have responded with some basic Spanish of my own. I took several years of it back in school and tried to speak it with Hispanic customers when I worked in retail, in order to welcome them and help them feel more comfortable. I have been to other countries where I was the only one who didn’t speak the language, and it can be a lonely feeling. I also think that multilingualism is undervalued in the US, especially by older people. This used to be a more multilingual country back before the World Wars. Now, with globalization, it is becoming that way again. I feel like this is both inevitable and healthy, and that people who resist it are on the wrong side of history.
These all seem like good enough reasons not to put me on a list, unless it’s a “tolerant allies” list. Possibly the right move would have been for me to say hello in Spanish and go into my retail routine. However, I was in observation mode from looking at the leaves, not in conversation mode, so your hostility caught me off-guard, and I wasn’t quite game for the uphill battle of trying to win you over.
Either way, we are neighbors in proximity, if not in spirit. You get what you give. If you want to have good neighbors, you have to be a good neighbor. We all create the world we live in, one interaction at a time. I might leave this letter at your door, across the street from the baby house, and then go on my way, and probably get caught on camera again not hurting anything. If I do, I hope it will encourage you to give unfamiliar people the same chance you would want them to give you. After that, you shouldn’t have to worry about me again…until maybe next Fall. I’ll try to have my Spanish ready to go — if you’ll remember to practice waving back.
