In a discussion group today, a classmate gave a presentation on his research subject: the Educational Philosophy of Fred Rogers.  Yes. Fred Rodgers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame. As he spoke and led the group in a discussion, I reflected on my own experiences, and a wave of emotion struck me.  And I was struck by an insight that has solidified the dear place that Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood holds in my heart.

Seeing Mister Rogers and his neighborhood friends on television is a very early memory for me.  I recall enjoying the show, although thinking that Mister Rogers and his world was… well… odd.  He was so calm and deliberate.  He took things slowly. As he moved across the room it was as if the room was forced to wait for him.  In that sense, he commanded the room. Things didn’t affect him, he affected things.  He also seemed so quiet when he spoke.  No, I’m sure that was not just my 1970′s-era rabbit-eared TV.  He really was speaking at a conversational level and it struck me that I so rarely heard anyone sound like that.  Most everyone I knew was typically loud.   I recall leaning into the television set, on my knees in front of it, to hear him.

But what struck me as most strange about Mister Rogers was his neighborliness.  He interacted with other individuals whom he introduced as his neighbors.  They cordially greeted each other and they treated each other with real dignity.   He demonstrated a genuine concern for how they were doing and a curiosity about their work and the circumstances of their lives.   He invited them into his home.  And when he needed help, or his neighbor needed help, they would just ask for it.   This behavior, this neighborliness, was really very foreign to me but I intuitively sensed that this was good.  I didn’t know my neighbors.  And in fact, I was not really encouraged to know my neighbors.  I had a few neighborhood friends, kids my age, whom I played with after school.  But I never saw our parents interact, unless it was over some issue regarding our safety.  I didn’t know any of my neighbors’ names, except the parents, and typically only the Mother, of my handful of neighborhood playmates.

Watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood made me long for something better than what I had.  I wanted to live in such a place.  A place where my neighbor would know me and I would know him. I place where the postman would talk to me.  A place where people worked different jobs and were appreciated for how they contributed. A place so safe, so happy, so overflowing with dignity and humanity.  A place so good.

What was really unsettling for me was that Mister Rogers’ neighborhood was supposedly mine.  I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, PA, the home of WQED and Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.   I knew this as a young boy.  I actually lived in Mister Rogers Neighborhood.  And yet I didn’t.   My corner of the neighborhood was not so neighborly.  Why was that?  What happened?

And so, sitting in class and listening to the discussion, it dawned on me that it was through Mister Rogers Neighborhood, at a very young age, 4 or 5, that I came to realize that the world I was living in was broken.  I was in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and yet I was not.  I had neighbors and yet I did not know them and they seemed to have little to no interest in knowing me.  My parents modeled this.  I don’t ever recall my Father or my Mother acting like Mister Rogers did toward my neighbors.  It was as if we were surrounded by people, and yet we were alone.   When we wanted to interact with people, we always got in the car and drove elsewhere, typically to church, sometimes to a friend’s house.

I don’t really think my childhood experience is much different from others of the same age.   I have come to see that I really am, in may ways, a product of an era.  Born in 1975, I’m a Generation Xer.  It has been said that the one of the defining features of Gen Xer’s is their sense of abandonment and alienation.  Increasingly, this has a ring of truth to it.   For it seems I grew up in a time when even neighborliness was being abandoned.   Thank God for people like Mister Rogers who had the wisdom to see it and who held up a vision of something far more wonderful.