Whoever called in on the church services, the lone girl playing basketball, the walking couple, and our pickleball game did so not out of any concern about a spreading virus. They did so out of deep-seated resentment toward their fellow man, and out of a sadistic pleasure in wielding the ability to worsen other people’s lives.

We have an alarming number of citizens who are more than willing to use whatever sudden increase in available state power to squeeze their fellow citizens. While we don’t toil under totalitarianism, we are undoubtedly fostering the turn-in-your-neighbor culture under which such a system would thrive. //

top-down litigation bound to ensnare itself in the reeking putrescence of our court systems is inadequate to stem the tide. What is needed is a grassroots, intrinsic realignment (or a renaissance, if you will) of what it means to be a citizen and a neighbor. //

keep the focus on calling out the turn-in-your-neighbor mentality for the sad exhibition of snide control freakishness that it is. If you witness someone sneering about how she snitched, shame her for it, and do it loudly and publicly. Put snitches on defense. Isolate them. Make their behavior unacceptable.

Bosnian and Rwandan ditches are full of corpses whose betrayers were lifelong neighbors a week prior. For those who think that our society is immune to this terrible human condition, I wonder on what you base that assumption.