Your Neighbor Is Not Your Enemy

In the summer of 1768, a Pennsylvania lawyer named John Dickinson published a song in the Boston Gazette. Colonists sang it at meetings, dinners and celebrations up and down the coast, and one line from it has outlived almost everything else written that year: "By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall." 

Dickinson wrote those words for addressing thirteen quarreling colonies facing common problems. I believe that over 250 years later, they still belong on the wall of every city hall, chamber office and coffee shop on Main Street. Because in today’s world in which we live, somebody is making a lot of money keeping us apart.

Let’s begin with the phone in your pocket. A team of researchers studied more than 2.7 million posts on Facebook and Twitter from news outlets and members of Congress. Posts about the other political side were shared about twice as often as posts about one's own side. Every single word aimed at the other team raised the odds of a share by 67 percent. That language also strongly predicted angry reactions. Today those same tactics are used to divide communities.

That is not an accident. In 2020, reporters uncovered an internal Facebook presentation from 2018 warning that the company's algorithms "exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness." It cautioned that, left unchecked, the platform would keep serving up more divisive content to hold our attention. Facebook disputed that reporting. But anyone who has watched a hometown community page knows the pattern. The ribbon cutting gets a dozen likes. The argument over the new stop sign gets four hundred comments. Good news rarely goes viral. It doesn't make anybody mad enough to click.

But I won't lay all of this at the feet of Silicon Valley. The country itself has pulled apart. Pew Research found this spring that more than nine in ten Democrats and Republicans alike view the other party unfavorably. Here's what gives me hope. In another Pew survey, wide majorities in both parties said it was important for the other side's leaders to compromise. Fewer than half said the same about their own side. We all want unity. We just want the other fellow to go first.

Our community is where that can change, and it matters for reasons that go well beyond feeling good.

First, trust still lives close to home. Gallup has found that about two thirds of Americans trust their local government to handle local problems, compared with roughly a third who trust Congress. Republicans and Democrats give local government similar marks. That trust is a valuable asset, and it is ours to protect or squander.

Second, connected communities survive hard times. Political scientist Daniel Aldrich studied recovery after disasters from Japan to New Orleans. He found that the deciding factor wasn't the size of the damage or the amount of aid. It was the depth of the ties among neighbors. Places with strong networks moved help where it was needed and kept people from leaving. Floods, plant closings and tornadoes don't check anyone's voter registration.

Third, isolation is making us sick. The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory reported that about half of American adults had experienced loneliness, and that lacking social connection is as harmful as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Every time we write off a neighbor over a yard sign, we cut one more thread that holds us together.

And then there is the local economy. Ask yourself when a divided town last landed a new employer, passed a school bond or kept its volunteer fire department fully staffed. Those wins take a whole community pulling the same direction.

None of this means we must agree on everything. Dickinson's colonies argued constantly. Unity isn't sameness. It is deciding that the boat we are all in matters more than which side of it we row from. When water rises, it rises for everybody.

Your town has a choice that no algorithm, cable news host or national campaign can make for it. We can let the outrage machine set the agenda at the school board, the county commission and the diner counter, or we can decide that here, at least, neighbors come first.

So here is my challenge this week. Find one piece of good news about your community, a new business, a student who earned an award, a volunteer who quietly showed up, and share it where the arguments usually live. Then go one step further. Call or have coffee with one neighbor you know votes differently than you do and talk about something you both want for your town..

We stand together, or we fall apart. The algorithm doesn't get a vote. We do.

John A. Newby, a Chamber CEO, Publisher & Media Executive, Business Owner, Consultant & International Speaker is the author of the "Building Main Street, Not Wall Street" a column dedicated to helping local businesses & communities build stronger foundations allowing them to thrive in a world where local is lost to Wall Street interests. His email is [email protected]