Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Fred Rogers first came through his front door and into our homes fifty years ago.  He put on his sneakers and his cardigan and welcomed everyone to his neighborhood.  My children were five and two at the time and their father was in Vietnam.  Mr. Rogers was  a part of our daily routine, a gentle, loving presence in an unpredictable and fearful time.

For 1968 is also remembered as the year that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were murdered, students protested, campuses shut down, racism was alive and well, the administration lied to us and in the fall we elected a new president who turned out to be a paranoid liar. Our country was mired in an endless war and escalating violence at home led eventually to horrors like the Kent State University campus massacre by law officers.

The teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes warned,  “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”   If only that weren’t so. Fifty years later, we are once again mired in an endless war, children are murdered in their schools, racism still rears its ugly head, people are shot in the streets by police and we have a paranoid, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist president who lies all the time: the very opposite of a Mr. Rogers who welcomes everyone into his neighborhood.  Where is Mr. Rogers when we need him?

Feeling the weight of the world, not an uncommon feeling these days, I took a walk last week in the neighborhood near my church. I parked by the Welcome Garden sign and started walking down the side streets. It was a day when dreary weather prevailed following one of our monster snowstorms, leaving broken branches and dirty drifts of snow.  Feeling like spring would never come (I write this on Tuesday March 13, a week before the official start of spring, as yet again snow piles up outside), I was not in a very good mood.

Yet I hadn’t gone far before I noticed a sign in Spanish and Arabic as well as English: No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor.

A couple of doors down a sign invited: Welcome to our porch.  I turned a corner and walked towards an elementary school.  Tacked onto several telephone poles, some pink papers in plastic sleeves were fluttering in the wind. I crossed over to one and read: Care for our air, no idling; Please don’t idle your car; children breathing.

By this time I had counted three Black Lives Matter posters and would see two more before I finished my walk.  Another house displayed the same multilingual sign I had seen before. The last that I noticed was one leaning over in the snow that said it all: In this house we believe: Black Lives Matter; Women’s rights are human rights; No human is illegal, Science is real, Love is love, Kindness is everything.

A short walk in one Concord neighborhood. One small pocket of hope in two square blocks of love.  That is what I saw that day.   Where is Mr. Rogers now that we need him?  The answer is: right here, and everywhere that good-hearted people ask “Won’t you be my neighbor?”

I walked back to my car with a lighter heart.