You Should Wave to Your Neighbors
Yes, seriously.
I was walking down the sidewalk toward my apartment after parking a little further down the street. I had a bag of Taco Bell with a drink.
Across the street, my neighbors seem to have lived there a while. It's a multi-family building, I believe. They have a big front porch with chairs and decor and a radio and beer.
If the weather is nice, the main man is there - a bigger fella with a big gray beard, wearing a hat, drinking a beer. He seems to be the patriarch in some way. He’s always sitting outside and chatting, with people who live there, with friends passing by. The radio blares into the night, to 10 or 11pm. Dad rock.
I’m walking to my apartment some time in the afternoon. The Big Man was there, with his beer and his radio turned low.
“Howdy!” he shouted across the street at me. I was newer to the neighborhood, but had been around long enough to be seen and known.
My shock was like whiplash. “Cheers!” I shouted back with a tip of my Baja Blast.
Maybe a peculiar response, but I’m a peculiar person. The Man smiled and laughed and tipped his beer to me.
I thought about that interaction the rest of the day.
I am visibly queer. My partner who lived with me was Black, and we lived in a small white town. I am sure the man across the street is a Republican or conservative of some measure. Beyond just the “look,” the 90s SUV in the driveway has a front plate with a silhouette of a busty pin-up babe colored by the American Flag. A true red-blooded patriot. But in that moment, first and foremost, we were neighbors.
Some days later, I heard him again: “Cheers!”
He was grinning and holding up his beer.
I held up my Baja Blast once again and replied, “Cheers!”
These are the only interactions I’ve had with my neighbors across the street. I think about these interactions every week.
I live and grew up in a very classic, quaint American small town. It's the type of town you see in Hallmark Christmas movies. Old-fashioned street lamps, a big clock in the town square. The main street is shut down at least once a month for festivities, like the elementary school pumpkin fair, or the annual soup-tasting competition, or a classic car show.
I left for the cities for some years but ultimately returned (though, through no choice of my own, but that is a longer story). I returned at the end of 2022, amid an ever-increasingly divisive political and cultural atmosphere. I didn't know what to expect in my little old hometown after 5 years away.
My neighbors two or three houses down have a Democratic inclusivity sticker on their window. I see progress flags waved from porches next to houses with Trump banners. During the 2024 election cycle, I saw a single house that the yard was split between Harris posters and Trump posters; you could see the ongoing war of ideologies playing out every time you drove past. One more Harris sign, one more Trump banner. Not entirely surprising to see so much Democratic support from a suburb of aging WASPs - white Anglo-Saxon protestants. Of course, the county voted red at election time, regardless.
Still, it made me feel at least marginally safer, if only an iota.
Those neighbors have never waved hello.
Conservatives have the liberals beat by miles in the arena of building community. Liberals sow paranoia, hide behind academia, and disconnect themselves from the struggles of working people. People become Republicans because the Republicans at least pretend to care about working class issues. Republican voters feel good getting together to “fight for their rights;” they think they’re on the right path because their leaders promise to help them. Yet more and more, the Democrats show their hand as only belonging to their donors. They are repeatedly uninterested in their constituents and what they want.
Of course, the same is true of Republicans, as for being bought and sold. But they couch their atrocious policies in promises of resolving real world issues that people face. They convince working people that other working people are the enemy; conservatives abuse the inherent competition that capitalism breeds.
Liberals, Democrats, act as a polite wall to keep a dissenting populace placated, all the while refusing to resolve issues they could end in one sweeping move. Every year, they further distance themselves from their constituents, leaving huge swaths of apathetic, unmotivated, and cynical people who have given up on a government that will ever serve them.
The liberal cynics may be the worst citizens in the US. They generally agree with populist and socially progressive ideas, but have no faith they will ever be enacted. It keeps them apathetic to change and unmotivated, and unwilling, to help. Their cynicism keeps them from building or finding communities because they start to distrust everyone they meet. They dislike almost every candidate of every party, but they see the political posters and submit to their fate. They become a sort of purist in their own world, a purist who sees nihilism as the correct mode of thought.
Communities arise from trust, of which liberal cynics have none for any of humankind. Conservatives have trust in their politicians, their leaders, and themselves. They have hope and confidence.
The most vitriolic Nazis overpower the conservative media, and by extension the liberal media who must wag their finger at whatever the opponent is doing (even if they do it themselves). The worst that humanity has to offer is displayed and reiterated and shown off for spectacle.
Most people are not those kinds of people. Most people have some level of discernment for the bad and the truly evil. I worked at a gas station in this small town, a little place that only locals stopped by. In that gas station, we are all, first and foremost, neighbors. We are neighbors before politics, before race, before gender identity.
I am openly transgender. I was openly transgender when I worked at the gas station. My partner, at that time, was also an openly transgender Black woman. She would come to the gas station around the time I would close to walk me home. A local resident offered to give my partner a job because I had mentioned she was searching; he knew who she was - that was irrelevant.
When I told customers I was leaving the job, they all mourned for the loss of a great cashier. Some of them called me their favorite cashier. I’m fun and personable and relaxed as a cashier; it’s a job I truly excel at. Once, I gave a customer $12 for gas to get her home because her card declined; the regional manager heard and paid me back from the store. Another time, I covered the last dollar on a woman’s purchase. I let elderly, disabled, and children use the employee bathroom even though I wasn’t supposed to. I was patient with people who lingered a little too long at the end of the night. I patiently counted 200 pennies for a deaf man getting gas. I smile and wave and say hello, welcome, and have a great day. And I mean it, every single time, and the customers know that I mean it. Because you can feel the difference between a scripted line and a heartfelt goodbye.
Several years ago, a swastika flag popped up on the main street in my town. Less than 24 hours, it was taken down. It didn’t show up again.
This is a town built by and for the community. The retired weatherman is a local celebrity because he fully participates in every community event; he even went to a science fiction convention in town. The tri-county radio mentions my little town by name on every news sign-off, simply because it is so vibrant and full of life. “There’s always something happening,” is what they say.
Over the decades, the grind of capitalism and the divisiveness of politics have eroded communities everywhere, in all towns and cities and villages, on all fronts. The loneliness epidemic is an intentional tool to keep unhappy people complacent.
There is only one way to fight cynicism and loneliness. And it starts with smiling and waving to your neighbors.