Is There Any Such Thing As a Neighbor in Oklahoma?

A lawyer famously asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Just as famously, Jesus did not answer the question directly but told a story. Don’t you just love that?

The connection between this essay and the science of evolution is that a neighbor is someone with whom you exchange altruism, and altruism is one of the most serious topics in evolutionary science.

In Oklahoma, during racial tensions and the pandemic, I wonder just how many “neighbors” there are. Rather than simple neighborliness, we have either one extreme or the other.

• First, there are the bad neighbors, who are neighbors only in the sense of physical proximity. They are otherwise full of hatred toward their fellowman. Here in Oklahoma, especially in the rural town where I work (in contrast with Tulsa, where my family lives), a lot of people in the immediate neighborhood do everything they can to make themselves bad neighbors. Loud music is common. And twice, people have used my yard as a place over which to shoot their fireworks. They let their dogs run free and bite people (two of my colleagues, not yet me), they throw their garbage everywhere, in their own yards and everyone else’s. They make themselves as obnoxious as possible.
• Second, there are the good neighbors. But we cannot just relax and be neighbors. My wife and I were out walking and we met one of our neighbors, a black man who was cleaning up branches from his yard. We could have just been neighborly and said Good Morning, but it was the day of the Trump rally and racial tensions in Tulsa, so we felt an obligation to create small talk with him, which we all enjoyed. Those of us who are not part of the problem have to use every opportunity we can to promote the solution, in this case interracial friendship. We cannot just take neighborliness for granted. Altruism is so rare that it might die if we do not actively feed it.

Repeatedly on radio interviews, black people say that they are afraid that white police will shoot them even if they try to be nice to them and cooperate. They feel all white guns pointed at them, and they do not take a single day of life for granted. They fear that, each day they get out of the house, they might get shot. This is a horrible burden to have to bear. Are they overreacting? Actually, the chance of a black person getting shot by a white policeman is very small—but still much larger than the chances a white person faces. After what they have been through, a little overreaction is understandable. I cannot lecture them and say, You probably won’t get shot, so just calm down. My responsibility is to contribute to a solution.

I remember back to a time, not long ago in our neighborhood, when you could just treat everyone the same. But today, under Trump’s leadership of perceived hatred, good white people have to notice which of their neighbors are black and make special efforts to befriend them. People like us are the ones that will keep America from descending into racial chaos.

Why I Cheered the Runners

I was about to leave my house and walk to my office one Saturday morning in October. I heard shouts outside and saw runners go down the street. (Not the sidewalk. In Durant, the sidewalks are in dangerous disrepair. So the street was closed by the police for the safety of the runners.) It was a community awareness and fundraising event. I did not know the background story of this event.

I still don’t. I decided that I did not need to know. The most important thing is, in my view, that this event was occurring at all. It was a wonderful example of altruism.

                                     

Altruism is where animals are nice to each other, and they both (or all) benefit from it. It is not necessarily self-sacrifice; it can be mutual benefit. And it is usually enjoyable. We humans not only have the instinct of being nice, but we enjoy it. The runners enjoyed running, their sponsors enjoyed donating money to the community benefit, and everyone enjoyed social interactions with their neighbors.

In Oklahoma, most people aren’t very good at altruism. Many of the Durant, Oklahoma altruists were involved in this event. But at least as many people in Durant are hostile toward altruism. They are hostile to their neighbors. They prefer to throw their garbage into their neighbors’ yards just to prove how hostile they are. (About ten percent of my garbage is what other people throw in my yard.)

So when I see altruism in action, I want to celebrate it. I was unprepared for this event, even though it went right past my front yard. But I stood out in the yard and clapped for the runners, none of whom I actually knew. And they thanked me. I got more “thank you” wishes in a half an hour than I usually get in a month.

Our Shared Environment

I am sure I have written about this idea previously: What we do to the environment of the Earth, locally or globally, is directly involved with how we relate to other people. How can we say we love our human brothers and sisters if we pollute the environment we share with them? Love your neighbor—and it is your neighbor’s Earth.

A particularly amazing example of the disregard that some people have for their neighbors, and their neighbors’ environment, has come to my attention in rural Oklahoma, where I live. When I first heard about it, I could hardly believe it, until it was corroborated by a second person. Both of these people, who do not know one another, grew up in and still live in rural Oklahoma. I still find it hard to believe, but I will pass the story on to you.

One way that some rural residents of Oklahoma have of getting rid of their garbage is to put it in the flatbed of a pickup truck and drive around until the wind blows it away. This does not work for heavy objects like beer bottles—those are more efficiently disposed of by throwing them out the window—but it works very well for paper and plastic. There are two reasons for this. First, Oklahoma has a lot of wind. Second, the air pressure is greater down in the pickup bed than in the moving air (moving, that is, relative to the pickup bed) above the pickup bed, virtually guaranteeing that the light garbage will be lifted out and blown away.

People who do this sort of thing might as well have a bumper sticker on the truck proclaiming, “This is what I think of you, you worthless miserable fellow Americans—I will dump my garbage on you.” Of course, they do not want to actually say this, so they pretend that, oh-oh, the wind just happened to lift the garbage out of my truck, oh well. Maybe they are even salving their own consciences by pretending that they are not really dumping their garbage when they do this.

As I said, I would not have believed this story had it not been told to me by two people who do not know one another or live in the same town.