Member-only story
Should You Be More Suspicious of Your Neighbor?
We Don’t Trust What We Don’t Know
A 2001 Gallup survey reported that 25% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans believed that crime had increased in their neighborhood over the last year. 20 years later, in 2022, those numbers have shot up to 42% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans reporting they are more fearful of crime.
It appears that Democrats and Republicans are agreed on at least one thing: that they live with more fear.
What about you? What do you really believe about your neighbor? Should you be more suspicious?
By neighbor, I mean the rest of the people who make up your community. Are you more or less afraid or suspicious of them than you were five years ago?
The things we believe about one another impact the way we treat them.
If I’m convinced you are a good person, I will likely ask you to watch my home while I am out of town. If I suspect you are a thief, I will never tell you my house will be empty for a week.
Our perspective on the world has changed substantially since I was a kid. I roamed freely around my neighborhood on foot or bike. My neighborhood friends and I were often to be found up at the churchyard playing football or at the school’s baseball diamond pretending to be…
