Good neighbors, please step up now

An increasingly isolated people now find their nation similarly needing connections

Here’s Roscoe last week, watching for his pals to show up. He loves our neighborhood, too. (RS photo)

Our neighborhood, a place where the rolling countryside meets the edge of town, positively buzzes in springtime: frogs and bumblebees add their humming percussion to the songbirds’ music, with humans pitching in a less melodic bass line of mowers, chainsaws and the noisy motorbike of a kid up the hill. It’s the kind of place where I imagined living back when I was squeezed into the city. There are big lots with a jumble of comfortable homes, some filled with young families and others housing retirees who aren’t yet ready to give up the greenery and elbow room for the downsizing that eventually attaches to aging. We’re in the latter category. We love it here.

It's not just the place we like; it’s the people, too. One neighbor brings in our mail and newspapers when we’re away, and we water the plants for the folks next door while they travel. Since we’re on a corner lot, all the dogs stop by to play with our friendly mutt, Roscoe, yielding inter-generational friendships among their human families. We’ll have a neighborhood picnic across the way on the first day of summer; I’ll set up a croquet course and a badminton net, and another neighbor will fire up the grill for burgers and hot dogs.

We know we’re lucky: A just-released Pew Research Center study finds that only a quarter of Americans say they know all or most of their neighbors, and just 44 percent say they trust those they know. It’s not a new phenomenon, this who’s-my-neighbor notion, but the data shows that a decline in human connections has continued across our society for decades.¹ Two years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General reported that half of Americans are afflicted by the loneliness that tends to follow social isolation, which raises their risk of premature death by 29 percent — an impact similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia, the report said, and it’s expensive: Social isolation accounts for an extra $6.7 billion in Medicare spending each year.²

Our government won’t do anything about that just now, of course, because the warning about the toll of social isolation was issued in the Before Times — that is, before the federal government was placed into the hands of an administration and a Congress that is more concerned about enhancing the assets of the wealthy than protecting the health of the ordinary. The House stalled this week in its drive to deliver the trillions of dollars in tax breaks that Donald Trump has promised not because the budget was too skimpy in its protection of the American people, but because it was seen by many Republican lawmakers as yet too generous. Of course, the tax cuts in the budget bill would disproportionately benefit high-income earners, and the spending cuts would be disastrous for middle-income and poorer Americans, but a MAGA speedbump arose because the empowered right wing wants to wring even more savings from social safety-net programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. Does anybody who doesn’t own a red MAGA cap think this won’t lead to more distress and instability in a population that is already hurting?

It's out of vogue to mention it, but there is even greater need among those beyond America’s borders, whose cries for help America increasingly meets with a shrug. Oxfam has estimated that the cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development alone will mean that 23 million children will lose access to education and as many as 95 million people will lose basic health care, potentially leading to more than 3 million preventable deaths each year.

We don’t know those people, though — nor, apparently, do we care to. We seem to think that they’re not our neighbors.

This is precisely the challenge that Pope Leo XIV spelled out in his first homily last week, as he pointed to “the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.” In the breadth of his call to action, Leo seemed to be alluding to the expansive definition of who our neighbors are that emerges from the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, who cared for an enemy he found in need by the side of the road.³

In fact, all the world’s major religions teach that believers should care for strangers. By that standard, our neighbors are not just the people we know or those who look and think like we do, but everyone around us, including those we might disdain or distrust. The scriptural imperative in the Judeo-Christian heritage, for example, is clear: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” the book of Leviticus declares, though the pious today are less likely to recall a command just a few verses further along: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself,” it says.⁴

That’s not the way of the Trump administration. Rather famously now, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost pushed back on the suggestion of Vice President JD Vance in a Jan. 29 Fox News interview that Catholicism taught a hierarchy of care — first for family, and then, in order, care for neighbor, community, citizens of your own country and, last, others in the world. “JD Vance is wrong,” the man who would become Pope Leo XIV posted on X. “Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”⁵

But we are far beyond the point of hoping that spiritual or ethical standards will influence the thoroughly transactional Trump administration. So what, our current leaders seem to say, if most of us don’t know or trust the neighbors nearest us, and if our isolation is making us sick? No worry of that sort has been mentioned in the first four months of the Trump administration; to the contrary, it has been made clear to us that Americans really are supposed to care for themselves, mainly, to expect less of their government and surely to not worry about distant lands.

You cannot blame the isolation of Americans on Donald Trump; the trend of loneliness predates his golden escalator glide into politics. In fact, Trump may be the ultimate product of our disconnectedness from each other: People who feel alienated from their neighbors and their society are surely more likely to embrace a go-it-alone political philosophy laid out by someone who postures as a tough guy. And so he leads us further away from the global connections that sustain our nation as surely as personal connections sustain us individually.

It is an attitude that speaks of a whole society tumbling into deeper isolation from the world, placing the nation itself on a trajectory toward risk no less acute than the growing personal isolation imperils individuals.

We know what can help people who are feeling isolated. Mental health experts suggest that we can reach out to help bring people together to share experiences of art, music, the outdoors, history, sports, culture and religion — the sort of things that make us human. We can encourage the lonely among us to connect with people who share their interests. We can be more present in their lives.

But what of whole societies that are slipping into isolation? Take note, for instance, of Trump’s determination to break the tight seal of America with Europe, and of his attitude toward our nearest neighbors — his threats to take over Canada, perhaps by military force, and to send U.S. troops into Mexico to fight drug traffickers. Let’s hope America doesn’t need to call on its old friends for help anytime soon. The neighbors might not answer the doorbell.

It’s reasonable to infer that as a kid growing up in Queens in the 1950s, Donald Trump didn’t get a great grounding in neighborliness. Too bad that his childhood didn’t coincide with the 33 years that Fred Rogers hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the legendary public TV program that focused on children’s social and emotional needs. Imagine if the wealthy youngster who would become president had been taught about civility, tolerance and sharing, rather than what came his way — a childhood described in a scholarly paper last year as including “parental neglect, physical beatings, the development of survival instincts and an obsession to win.”⁶ What could we expect of the man who would emerge from that?

He will not change now, certainly. So if we are to get through the years of sad isolation and turmoil ahead, it will be up to us to provide the comfort that comes from connection.

Like most American neighborhoods, ours isn’t very racially or economically diverse, but we do have varying political views. One of our friends up the street kind of sheepishly told us this week that he now regretted casting his vote for Trump. We know him well enough to not be too sympathetic about his belated chagrin. “Really? Again?” my wife said. “What did you expect?”

But Americans have always tended to believe and hope for the best. That same Pew survey found that three-quarters of us would bring in the mail or water plants for out-of-town neighbors, that almost the same number would conserve water or electricity if a public official asked them to do so, and two-thirds would bring a meal to a sick neighbor.

That sounds like the kind of people we Americans still aspire to be, even if our leaders are more selfish, less kind, less neighborly. We just need more of the kind of neighborhood that Fred Rogers described. “Look for the helpers,” he often said. “You will always find people who are helping.” We have to hope that is true, and to understand that now, especially, those people must be us.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/08/how-connected-do-americans-feel-to-their-neighbors/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosfinishline&stream=top

2. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

3. Luke 10:25-27

4. Leviticus 19:18-34

5. https://www.newsweek.com/robert-prevost-criticize-jd-vance-months-before-becoming-pope-2069849

6. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4971754

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-Rex Smith

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