Next Door

Full disclosure: I don’t like “the site formerly known as Facebook,” and I don’t really understand Instagram. I enjoy Twitter—it feels like a fun quick one-line blog to me (one that only my few hundred followers ever see…thanks, friends!) and offers me some good links to professional content.

And then there’s “Next Door.”

I signed up for Next Door because it seemed like a good idea to crowd-source community safety. How else would I know that porch pirates are on the loose in Covington Lakes or that Farmingham Woods is experiencing car break-ins? Or that a particular restaurant made a guy named Larry very sick after he ate their Thursday special?

Also, I got a puppy. And, honestly, I was worried that if it got lost, I’d be frantically trying to figure out how to set up an account and choose all the images of crosswalks or stoplights just to ask people for help finding it when time was of the essence… So I set up my account as a precaution and promptly ignored it. My puppy seems to stay in the yard. I keep my car in the garage, try to bring in packages promptly, and avoid Thursday Specials as a rule.

Thus, I have rarely used Next Door. The one time I tried to engage on it, I ended up with 86 extremely micro-manage-y replies to a very innocent post I made trying to explain to a very angry “neighbor” why sometimes a dog walker leaves a bag under a bush to retrieve on the end of the walk instead of carrying it for two miles. I did not understand public/private settings on Next Door and was thus subjected to a million DMs titled “Dog Poop” over the next 72 hours until my sister who is more social-media savvy than I am helped me figure out how to disengage from the whole thread. YEESH. I had no idea people were so passionate about dog poop, but they are. Trust me. They are.

Having learned my lesson after the dog poop debacle, I have stayed off Next Door for the most part. I monitor reports of suspicious cars, coyotes that might eat your dog or children, recommendations for painters, and free exercise equipment for sale. And I keep to myself. If Next Door were really a neighborhood, I would be that neighbor who comes and goes with a shy smile without speaking instead of yelling at you about why your grass isn’t mowed or giving you my best advice on why you should replace your windows or whether the teachers in our school district should settle their contract based on my extensive lack of knowledge of the situation.

But Next Door likes to push your buttons.

It dangles “push notifications” (which I should learn to turn off but worry I will miss a picture of an armed robber loose on the cul de sac), and sometimes the click bait hooks me against ALL my better instincts.

That’s why today I found myself reading comments in response to some guy named Dan (not his real virtual name) who lives in what Next Door has decided is “my neighborhood” but is really seven or eight miles away. Dan has very strong opinions about COVID and vaccinations, and he apparently has not realized that everyone else does too, or…Dan just likes to stir the pot…provided the pot is far enough away that there’s no chance of anything splashing on him.

I was about to close the whole screen out when I saw Dan’s last post in the stream. “Virus gonna virus,” he wrote, going on to explain that in the first known cases of Omicron variant in the U.S. many of those were people who were vaccinated and boosted. He bootstrapped from there his thesis that vaccinations won’t bring herd immunity; only infections will. Dan’s pretty sure of that. So according to him, we should be fairly satisfied with our state’s low vaccination rate and just “virus on.”

I read the papers. Several different ones. Extensively. So I know better than to challenge the Dans out there on their views, having seen the vitriol on both sides of this issue. And who knows? Maybe Dan’s right about how the virus will eventually learn to live with us. He seems like a smart guy; he used the phrase “confirmation bias” in one of his comments about the media. He’s done well for himself based on where his “next door” home is and the fact that he has time to hang out on a virtual neighborhood discussion stream sharing his opinions freely with anyone who has not asked. In a real neighborhood, Dan would be the guy you see working in the yard and hurry past so you don’t get stuck in a long discussion about politics. On Next Door, you don’t have to pick up your pace; you can just close the screen. I don’t have to listen to Dan in this pretend neighborhood. Our relationship is not real.

But Dan does live in my real community. My real state. My real country. And thus, Dan is, in a sense, my neighbor. And Dan’s actions are his own business, but when he stands on my virtual corner telling all of us what to do, then it’s hard to know whether I should just ignore him. I was raised to speak up when someone is doing something hurtful to others. As a teacher, I know all children are ours. As a parent, I told my kids not to stay silent when their friends did something wrong.

After pausing and counting to 50…something I wish more of us (including me) did more often before “posting” stuff to the world in these days of easy clicking, I decided ultimately not to engage Dan on Next Door (nor the 86 people who were already adding their two cents on various sides of his statement…some of whom I recognize from the dog poop debate). I think by now, most of us have realized we don’t change hearts and minds on this topic by sharing our “truth.” Dan doesn’t care what we think. He’s really sure he’s got the right of it. And Dan and I don’t have a real relationship—much as Next Door would like to make us all feel cozy like we do.

But if I really knew Dan, and we encountered each other in our REAL neighborhood, then I might have the chance to say this to his “virus gonna virus” comment:

In our REAL actual neighborhood, there are a lot of doctors and nurses. I have talked to them on my real, actual walks outside…in the real neighborhood, not the virtual one. And they are absolutely beyond EXHAUSTED, physically and emotionally, from taking care of people who are very sick with the virus right now…people who might not be in the hospital if they had done what they could to mount the best possible personal defense against this common enemy (which does not care who we are or what we think) by getting vaccinated. Sure, Dan, “virus gonna virus” (whatever that slangy little phrase is supposed to convey about your hip street cred), but doctors and nurses must care for the sick—for me, for you, for the people we love, for people we don’t know at all—because that’s what they’ve given their lives to do. I’ll put it in your lingo: “exhausted overtaxed doctors gonna doctor” “fatigued stressed on-back-to-back-shifts-because-there’s-no-one-else nurses gonna nurse”. And they are doing it down at the hospital for hour upon hour while you sit behind your screen telling us we don’t need to help.

You’re plenty smart, Dan, and you’re full of opinions. But you’re selfish. And you’re using your platform to push selfishness and lack of care for our fellow human beings waging war on this virus to save the lives of real people. And there’s nothing smart or admirable or strong or loving about that. That’s not neighborly.

Those of us who aren’t medically trained can’t do much to fight COVID. We can’t administer monoclonal antibodies or steroids or IV drips. We can’t decide whether to intubate or care for someone on a ventilator. We can’t take blood or adjust oxygen masks or change soiled bedsheets or record vitals. We can’t go through the doors of the ER and respond to the people stacked everywhere waiting for quality care who are scared and sick enough to come for help. And we can’t comfort their families when the news is bad.

But we can get ourselves protected enough that we don’t add to the burden. We can do things that are not selfish. We can consider the fact that we don’t know it all. And we can encourage our community to do the same. Every one of us can do that.

I think that’s what real “next door” neighbors would do for each other.