How well do you know the people living on either side of you, across the street, and down both sides of your block?

Many of our neighborhoods across America today are rows of houses where other than occasional hand waves of recognition, residents keep to themselves and families move on with their lives with little or no contact with each other.

The website Patch reports, “In many communities, the image of friendly neighbors chatting over fences, sharing meals, and supporting one another has become increasingly rare. The decline in neighborly communication is a phenomenon that has been observed in urban, suburban, and even rural settings.”

There are several components to the breakdown of neighborly communication. We are so attached to our cellphones and computers that we don’t care to associate with whom lives next door or across the street. Another reason is that families now more than ever choose to keep their lives private.

I grew up in the ’60s when most of my neighborhood’s families lived in the same houses forever. My parents could send me across the street to borrow a hammer or some brown sugar for Mom’s apple pie bake.

Today, people move a lot more than they did 60 years ago, on the average of three times during their lifespans. Job transfers and school choices have us living in any one neighborhood for no more than five years.

This evolution of the American neighborhood has had an impact upon lack of unity within our population. From reciting the Pledge of Allegiance together to a collective patriotic love for living in the greatest country in the world, we have seemingly lost what used to be the fabric of American pride — the closely knit neighborhood.

Gone are the picnics that moved from backyard to backyard on summer weekends. No more do our children run next door to jump in the neighbor’s pool as soon as they see their kids come outside in their bathing suits. Missing in most communities are the half-dozen or so kids riding their bicycles every day like they were a sheriff’s posse out to hunt down the bad guys.

Christians are told to “love thy neighbor,” and nowhere in the Bible does it say, except for people of different color, culture or for any other reason we might not want to be in their company. In some towns, particular religious groups have not assimilated with anyone outside their beliefs and customs, which has added to the widening division of our population.

Research says that without relationships with our neighbors, there have been dramatic increases in personal isolation and clinical depression. Another consequence is the increase in community crimes. On a larger scale, a lack of neighborly connection has contributed to a decrease in personal growth and life satisfaction.

We can no longer ask the stranger living next door to pick up our child from school when we’re working late or ask if he or she could take the key we gave them to our house and let our dog outside because we won’t be home for several hours.

A Rutgers University study states, “Neighbors might not necessarily prevent us from feeling depressed, but they are an important part of the social landscape and contribute to what makes life worth living. From bringing in our mail or making a meal, to providing regular social interaction, neighbors can play an important role in middle and older age. The 10-year data, from over 1,000 adults ages 40-70, showed that continuity in the neighbor relationship was especially important for more developmental aspects of psychological well-being.”

I grew up in what I would call a “back door neighborhood” where any one of several housewives would come over on a summer afternoon and open the back door without an invitation to visit my mother. If I went up the street to Eddie’s house, I would knock on the back screen door and shout, “Can Eddie come out to play?”

I was a paperboy and everyone who was on my route within three blocks knew me by my first name. If somebody put up a badminton net, within hours there were kids from the block playing the game. At picnics, the men held a bottle of beer in one hand and a horseshoe in the other, and they would play until the sun went down.

With a high degree of regularity, I watched TV in the living rooms of the Bogus, the Rose, the Carr and the Weikert families. On Halloween, we got the best candy from all the families within our three-block surroundings. If a new family moved into our neighborhood, our “Welcome Wagon” greeted them with home-baked cakes and cookies.

I’ve lived in a townhouse for the past seven years now and I literally know one part-time resident and a handyman who comes around once in a while to fix things. I know that some older communities are much more closely knit, but I’m left thinking that many kids today will grow up never having played a pickup basketball or sandlot baseball game. They will never have hung out at the park together or pedaled down a country road with the neighborly friends during a rainstorm while laughing all the way home.

What was once “love thy neighbor” has become “who’s my neighbor?” Some communities are trying to build relationships by having block parties and “meet and greet” social events so that when they go out to their vehicles in the morning, instead of just a casual wave, they can shout across the yard, “Hey, John. How are you?”

Author Abhijit Naskar wrote, “One person caring for one neighborhood, that’s how we’ll change the world, not with policy and policing.”

If we can put away our religion, our race and our politics for just enough time to build all-inclusive neighborhoods, we can “crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com