Snapler

As a society, we've become fragmented by ethnicity, income, red state vs. blue; pro-this, anti-that. But we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines. I'm talking about the property lines that too often isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.

That thought first occurred to me in the aftermath of a tragedy on my suburban street in Rochester, New York: a man shot and killed his wife, and then himself; their two young children ran screaming into the night. I knew the couple just a little, enough to wave "hello" if I saw them out jogging together. Later, I learned that on the day she was murdered the wife had feared her husband and had tried desperately to contact her best friend to see if she and her children could stay over that night. What she didn't know was that her friend was out of town on a day trip. And so that evening, when her husband got home and began burning their mortgage papers in the fireplace, she had nowhere to go: despite having lived on our street for seven years, she didn't know any of the neighbors well enough to seek shelter at their homes. Within an hour of his return, her husband killed her.

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