When I lived as a boy on a farm in rural North Carolina, the area where we lived did not exactly revel in wealth. Most of the people with whom I grew into young adulthood lived on modest means. My own family fell somewhere towards the lower middle class in daily living standards if not in equity accumulation and cash flow. Evidently my father followed the Rich Dad Poor Dad strategies before Robert Kiyosaki ever discovered them. When he was not working his day job as a technician and quality inspector at the local General Electric transformer manufacturing plant, he worked with our family on our 200 acre farm, raising crops, herding beef cattle, growing fresh garden vegetables and fruits, and performing regular repairs and maintenance on buildings and equipment.
My parents spent their youths in the Great Depression and had a hard earned respect for the dollar. We attended church weekly and followed the traditional Protestant work ethic as did most people in our part of the country. They also respected education and understood its value and made sure my brother -- their only other child -- and I paid attention to our studies. They also bought us books of interest on a regular basis to keep us mentally engaged. A set of encyclopedias in the living room got regular use as discussions over dinner, around the fireplace, or in front of the television generated questions that led to consulting them.
So while we did not enjoy as many of the "toys" some of our peers did, my brother and I still led adequate lives materially and rich lives intellectually.
Just down the road from us, our neighbors did not enjoy quite the abundance we did. But even among them, drastic differences in their "inner lives" led to drastically different results. One family shared the strong work ethic and always came looking for work -- not handouts -- on our farm to supplement their day jobs in the local factories. They were "poor" compared to us but they did not view themselves as poor. They have remained good friends with our family for as long as I can recall. Their father even helped my father several times to drive from home to cancer treatment center and back some years ago during my father's successful battle against lymphatic cancer. They may have been poor in matter, but they were (and are) rich in spirit.
Sadly, others in that area suffered an impoverishment in spirit far worse than their impoverishment in matter. One rental shack buried deeply within the woods near our farm housed all manner of such poor souls. Alcoholism, promiscuity, ignorance, and outright stupidity ruled the roost for them. They regularly came to our house looking for free use of our phone. Several times, they appeared wanting us to call emergency services because of a heart attack (real or imagined), multiple shallow stab wounds (real), and the reporting of a suicide via gunshot to the head (real). One winter, they depleted their firewood supply and decided to use the wood planks in their ceiling to heat their home. The landlord finally called it quits and demolished what was left of the shack. My family and I delighted at this news.
My move to Florida to work in the space program did not put an end to neighborly nutters. I felt little surprise at encountering the occasional drunk or druggie in the low rent apartment building where I first lived. I felt more surprise at encountering them in the middle class ranch house subdivision where I finally bought my first (and current) home. For a period of several years, my neighbors in the house next to mine consisted of a senile old woman and her two adult children (daughter and son), both of whom suffered drug addictions and various mental disorders. The daughter evidently liked to party heavily and hang with the wrong kinds of people. Late one night, one of her boyfriends came knocking at our door, awakening us, looking to the wrong house for his girlfriend. Another night, the son staggered outside in his undershirt and jockey shorts, and then managed to break the lock on our screen porch door, entering our screen porch, and attempted to open our locked sliding glass door to enter our house. We heard the noise and opened the blinds to see this half naked nutter ask if he was at the right house. When we told him he needed to go one house over, he said, "Oh, no! Sorry! I feel like such an idiot! I'll come back tomorrow and fix your lock." He never did, of course -- and yes, he felt like an idiot because he was an idiot.
Regularly, emergency services would appear at their doorstep to resolve crises real or imagined. In one incident, the daughter, in a stoned stupor, came staggering from her house and grabbed the arm of our lawn service man, shouting, "Call 911 -- I'm gonna kill myself!" So he did and they came and took her for the umpteenth time to Circles of Care, the local psychiatric ward. The son finally died of a drug overdose. His body had grown so stiff that rescue workers nearly had to start snapping bones to get him from the premises.
The last straw came when the daughter became violent and attacked her mother. The mother left the house in such a hurry that she backed her car into a tree and severely dented a fender. The mother finally threw in the towel on her "baby," sold the house, and moved north to live with one of her better children, leaving the daughter to fend for herself. My wife and I were delighted never to hear from any of them again.
The real estate investor who bought the house had to sink many thousands of dollars into it to renovate it despite its relatively new construction. In simpler terms, he had to gut the place and start again. A urine-soaked mattress, filthy carpets, and destroyed fixtures only start to list what he had to replace. The trash he dragged to the curb became legendary in the subdivision.
There are people in this world (who ought to know better) who demand that I feel "species solidarity" with neighborly nutters like these. Worse, they feel that I ought to be made into a criminal if I choose not to call 911 at the whim of these entities. Pardon me while I refuse to share their enthusiasm for such legally sanctioned slavery.
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