Won't You Be A Neighbor?

The other night Sarah and I were settling down for the evening after a long day. The kids were finally in their beds, the house was manageably clean, and we had just plopped down on the couch in our living room, each clinging gratefully to a large glass of red wine. We then decided to do what any normal adults do in the first moments of an evening to just relax, unwind, and shed off all of the stress- we turned on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.

As we both watched, we were absolutely transfixed. We laughed, we cried, we held hands and felt love. I felt five again.

Every single time I turn on this amazing vintage show, I am in awe of the wonder and innocence that occurs inside of this imaginary neighborhood. Fred Rogers, always on cue, walks through the door singing about how good he feels and how happy he is to just be alive and get to "see" all the viewers who are on the other side of the screen anticipating his every move and thought. Peace floods the room of every child watching, and we are consistently captivated by the beauty of the mundane. We experience every day feelings and activities, while finding new ways to be amazed at their magnificence.

Mr. Rogers is an OG ("original gangster" for all you dinosaurs out there!). He owns his world and brings everyone along on a fantastical ride. It's a ride not filled with magic and special effects, but of the usual and the ordinary that all of us can find in our kitchens, our toy boxes, our toolboxes, our backyards, our neighborhoods, and our minds.

Mr. Rogers' show is, in many ways, the original show about nothing (sorry Seinfeld!), and yet the nothing of it is what makes it a very special something. The beauty of the contrast is what makes the show so beloved, still revered as one of the most influential, healthy, and life-changing shows that has helped children appreciate the usual, value differences, imagine the impossible, and most importantly learn to love themselves exactly as they are. People are at the center of everything that happens in this neighborhood.

But Mr. Rogers was also a "quiet radical" of his time, as described in a recent article by The Atlantic. People sometimes forget that when his show first aired, the Vietnam War was happening in real time. One of his very first episodes used the allegory of his puppet, King Friday, building a barbed wire fence around his castle as a way for children to talk about and understand the realities of this war. In one of his more powerful moments, Mr. Rogers and Officer Clemmons (an African American police officer and regular of the show), share a time sitting with their feet both in the same kiddie pool, an intentional response to the segregated public pools of that era in our country. Even when he would feed his pet goldfish on the show, Mr. Rogers would always say out loud what he was doing so that a certain blind girl who listened to his show would know that the fish was always being cared for. Everything he did was intentional, not least of which was allowing every child to know their worth and to feel special, as well as to remember that each of us is to be a neighbor to others because others are our neighbors too.

While there is much to be said about how we as a society have abandoned our wonder of the usual and the beauty of the mundane, we have more drastically abandoned our commitment to neighborhood.

We live in a time where we have forgotten about our neighbors. Countries around the world, including ours, are becoming more insular, nationalistic, self-focused, and protectionistic. We have perpetuated a belief that our differences create a tension, and that the tension from those differences should be feared. When we feel we've lost something, we blame "the other" and create the narrative that they took it from us. Thus, we resent them and make them our enemy. We may even make them seem less than human. It's easier then to lock them up, to separate them from each other, or to capitalize off of them in the countless different ways we've exploited them. This is not neighborly.

The heart of neighborhood is not that we would all be the same or seek "sameness," but instead that we would live in the beauty and tension of our differences as a way to make all of us better. We are beautifully different because of our genders, our cultures, our races, our beliefs, our passions, and our giftedness; all of it. When we divide ourselves up, we remain weak because we cannot build something bigger together. This allows those who seek to prey on our powerlessness the chance to pick our pockets while we're looking in the opposite direction. Hatred is a distraction that allows all of us to remain weak. Some are weakened by the hatred, while others are weakened by the results of that hatred. But make no mistake about it, we are all left weak.

Mr. Rogers longed for a different world, a world where we see the beauty that each of us brings to it. He wanted us to harness the beautiful brilliance of our uniqueness and use it to build a better world.

In a commencement speech to students at Dartmouth College in 2002, Mr. Rogers reminded us of some very important things that our current world has seemed to forget:

"Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel- a facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not... Deep down, we know that what matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win, too, even if it means slowling down and changing our course now and then."

It's hard to stay at war with one another, both literally and figuratively, when we heed these words from our favorite neighbor.

Stop being isolated by what you fear. Stop isolating others because they look, think, feel, or act differently than you.

In the Scriptures, Jesus tells us to "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." He goes on to ask, "For if you only love those who love you, what reward is there in that?"

Mr. Rogers reminds us about the idea of love itself: "Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like 'struggle.' To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now."

Go be a neighbor to those who are different than you, or to those who have no neighbors. Love beyond what it is convenient. Speak up for the whole neighborhood. It is much bigger than your own backyard.