A simple story about a street, a break-in and the neighbors who keep calling meetings.
R.M. Westerink; October 2026
“Better is a neighbor that is near than a brother far off.” — Proverbs 27:10
The Dutch have their own
version of that old line: "better a good neighbor than a distant friend". It
sounds like the kind of wisdom nobody needs to be told. Until the day you
actually need your neighbors. Here is a story about a street where that day has
come.
* * *
Picture a street. One
night, a resident forces his way into his neighbor’s house. The neighbor fights
back hard, but the intruder occupies several rooms, smashes the furniture, and
declares that the house was really his all along.
The other neighbors are
shocked. The house rightfully belongs to the man who lives there; they
recognized that themselves years ago, and so, for that matter, did the intruder.
They rush to help with money,
tools, and equipment so he can defend himself, and they take in his children.
That is a lot, and it costs them a lot. But it doesn’t get the intruder out.
Years later, the neighbor is still fighting, room by room, for his own house.
Here is the strange part:
together, the neighbors are far richer than the intruder. They have more
people, more money, and more know-how. On paper, they could run him off the
street in no time. So why don’t they?
Because the neighbors are
not one household. They do have a neighborhood association, and they meet
often, sometimes deep into the night. But on the biggest decisions, everyone
has to agree. One neighbor who would rather do business with the intruder can
hold everything up for months. On security, it’s even worse: everyone has their
own alarm system, their own locks, their own supplier, and nothing fits
together. There is no shared fund for security, no joint patrol, and no one who
can speak for the whole street. Every decision becomes a compromise, and a
compromise almost always comes too late.
The intruder has no such
problem. In his house, he is the only boss. He is poorer, but he is fast, and
he is willing to take a lot of punishment to get what he wants.
And the neighbors keep
doing the math the wrong way. Each of them calculates what helping costs. None
of them calculates what it will cost if the intruder wins.
For decades, the neighbors
have counted on their friend for their own safety: the rich and powerful man
who lives one street over. He has by far the strongest security, and he is the
heart of their shared agreement: an attack on one of us is an attack on all of
us. But he is not the friend he used to be. He asks out loud what his
protection is actually getting him, and the neighbors are less and less sure
what they can count on. These days, he talks directly with the intruder, about
business too.
Then he comes up with a
plan to end the violence. The intruder gets to keep part of what he has taken.
And the neighbor who was attacked may never join the shared protection
agreement. The plan was worked out at a table where the powerful friend and the
intruder sat down together. The neighbors weren’t there. The man whose house it
is wasn’t really there either.
The neighbors are angry.
But anger is not a policy. In principle, they could drive the intruder out, but
then they would take some blows themselves, and there is no majority for that
in any of their houses. So they do what they can do: put up extra fences and
locks around their own homes. Good fences make good neighbors, the saying goes.
But a fence does nothing for the man next door whose house is already occupied.
And so the neighbors begin to consider gently advising him to accept the plan
after all, hoping the intruder will stop.
That doesn’t mean they
agree the house belongs to the intruder. But they do accept something else:
that violence gets to decide what protection the victim is allowed to seek.
Whoever breaks in gains a say over the future of the house he attacked. And anyone
who lives on a street knows that an intruder who learns that breaking in pays
doesn’t stop at the first house.
And the neighbor himself?
He hears his well-meaning neighbors tell him that he is free, that the house is
his, and that they will help him to the very end so he can keep choosing his
own future. But the one thing that has to make that freedom real, his protection,
is being decided over his head, and over theirs.
* * *
Those
neighbors? That’s us.
From the street to the map
In simplified terms: the
street is Europe. The house is Ukraine, the intruder is Russia, and the
powerful friend down the road is the United States. The neighborhood
association is the European Union; the shared protection agreement is NATO.
Europe is defending a
principle: you do not move borders by force. It is making real sacrifices for
it. But it fails to turn its combined strength into power, because it decides
like an association while facing great powers that decide like a single person.
The result: plenty of money and promises, but too slow, too fragmented, and
without the muscle that tips the balance.
And that is not just
Ukraine’s problem. The real question for the rest of the street is how long its
own security will hold in a neighborhood where breaking in earns you a say, and
where the neighbors always have to call a meeting before they are allowed to
lock the door.
What good neighbors would do
It doesn’t have to end that
way.
Good neighbors would set up a shared fund for security instead of passing the
hat every time. They would decide by majority, so that one household can no
longer hold the whole street hostage. They would buy locks that fit together,
and choose one voice to speak for the street, at the table where its future is
decided. And they would put enough into the house next door that the intruder
concludes breaking in simply doesn’t pay.
Being a good neighbor was
never about sympathy. It is about understanding that the house next door is
part of your own security.
Shortsighted neighbors don’t just lose someone else’s house.
They show the intruder which doors to try next.
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