(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Kitchen Table Kibitzing 2/10/24: Your paranoid neighbors next door [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-02-10 If there is one scene from Michael Moore’s “Bowling For Columbine” that has stuck with me all these years (aside from his famous confrontation with Charlton Heston about gun violence, which drew most of the commentary at the time), it’s the one where Moore travels to Canada and discovers that — unlike in the U.S. -- Canadians generally don’t look the doors of their homes. Obviously, whether that assertion is actually true is debatable, but what I took away from Moore’s demonstration (where he literally walked into Canadians’ houses without them knowing he was coming) was more nuanced. Americans tend to be fearful of things that, statistically, they really shouldn’t. After 9/11 occurred an inordinate number of Americans were instilled with a fear that they might personally be attacked by terrorists, for example. Before that, when “Jaws” came out in the 1970’s, the fear was being attacked by a shark while swimming in the ocean. Not to minimize the fact that people have actually experienced such occurrences, but the reality is that neither of these types of events, statistically speaking, will ever, ever occur to us. The same thing is true of being victimized by violent crime in major American cities: If you’re visiting from out of town and reasonably cautious and aware of your surroundings, it’s almost certainly not going to happen to you. And yet, people proceed to govern their lives in the shadow of such inordinate fears. A racist couple (Trump supporters) down my street circulated a flier through the neighborhood a few years back inviting everyone to join “Nextdoor,” a social media site in which everyone talks about things they see in the neighborhoods. We didn’t join it for many reasons but mainly because we suspected that it was basically a forum for people to gin up each other’s like-minded, usually race-based paranoia about crime. And that’s pretty much what it has turned out to be, at least in our neighborhood. The Washington Post’s Rick Reilly has written an article about how “Nextdoor” has gotten out of hand. As Reilly notes, Nextdoor claims it is being used in 1 in 3 American homes. I don’t actually believe that figure, but even if it’s a tenth of that number, it’s pretty telling. As Reilly writes: On Nextdoor all you have to do is sign up, log in and start profiling everyone on your block. Teenager in a hoodie walking on your street? Lock your doors. Black guy with a backpack standing on the corner? Call the cops. Just last week on Nextdoor, someone in the Hamptons posted a front-door video of a teenage girl and wrote, “Does anyone recognize this young woman?” Yes, her mom did: “She is selling cookies to raise money to go on a high school trip. Shame on you. … Not everyone is a thief, or a bad person.” You’d never know it on Nextdoor. The hilarious podcast “I’ve Had It” found this one the other day: “I’ve seen a suspicious person now numerous times,” someone posted. “Aged mid-50s and white … Drives a luxury car but never seems to go to work. … Not sure how this person affords to do this … Hence, I’ve reported him to the IRS … Stay vigilant!” Part of me honestly feels bad for the people caught up in this nonsense. I’ve lived in my relatively sleepy suburban middle-class neighborhood for a quarter century now, and I have to say that crime — real crime, not just some teenagers egging my car, or joyriding my kids’ unattended bike and dumping it down the street — is pretty rare if not nonexistent. But one story about a hold-up at the convenience store around the corner or a domestic shooting two miles away and apparently the entire neighborhood should suddenly be on alert. Of course this all stems from a combination of “If it bleeds it leads” local news coverage which magnifies crime to the point where you suspect that criminals must be regularly casing your house, just salivating for the opportunity to ransack it. Obviously it depends specifically on where you live, but Fox News has turned this type of coverage into a religion for its viewers, and as a result people go through their lives believing that cities like Portland, San Francisco or Philadelphia are just eternal Mad Max hellholes of rampant crime and violence. They’re not, and the disconnect between perception and reality is staggering. Reilly’s article provides many examples of just how ridiculous this paranoia on Nextdoor has become. A “slow moving vehicle” following a school bus every day turns out to be the newspaper deliveryman. Someone taking a picture of your house with his phone becomes an armed robber plotting his invasion, when its actually someone who likes your flowers or landscaping. And yes, there is a huge element of racism in this, as Reilly points out: [W]ay too often, those innocents are people of color. In Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., a firestorm started on Nextdoor in 2020 about a Black Lives Matter protest some high school students were going to put on. But some neighbors read “protest” as planned “riot.” One wrote, “If anyone gets unruly or violent, I plan on coming with pepper spray and a stun gun to help the police … Looters need to be taught a lesson.” Pretty soon, the Target store had boarded up all its windows. In Oakland a couple of years ago, a guy posted a doorbell picture of a “suspicious” Black man and someone commented, “He looks like he is capable of anything.” The thing is, you never really realize how paranoid, fearful or racist your neighbors actually are, unless they let their mask slip (one family down the street was evidently incensed that my son had befriended a young Black child, who would ride his bike to visit our house; she verbally accosted my wife with some racial slur when their own child got in some kind of silly dust-up with ours). But on Nextdoor, as Reilly observes, some seem to feel compelled to play “Paul Blart, Mall Cop” (And don’t even get me started on “Ring” doorbells, either, or the astonishing prevalence of “home security systems” on my sterile, sleepy block: No one is planning on breaking into your home, folks!). As Reilly notes, these things foster the kind of mentality that prompts people to shoot someone for pulling mistakenly into their driveways, or chase and kill an innocent kid like Trayvon Martin based on absolutely no reason at all except racism and paranoia. Yes, I do feel a little bad for my fellow Americans who’ve caved to this type of fearmongering, but honestly I’m just kind of disgusted. I imagine that living in a continual atmosphere in paranoia has its psychological rewards, and these people probably pat themselves on the back for their vigilance, considering themselves validated every time they turn on the local news, but really, its just another self-serving feedback mechanism that just serves to further alienate Americans from each other. People are living their entire lives culturally isolated, afraid to visit a city or even venture out of their houses because of such unfounded fears. And then they die! But hey, Fox News made a lot of money scaring the pants off them for all those years. 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