Serve Your Neighbor: The Myth or the Legend?
Neighborhoods conjure up different thoughts for each of us. I think of the old Leave it to Beaver set with the white house, where the Cleavers sat around their formal table for dinner each night. They didn’t seem to know their immediate neighbors all that well, but I felt like they did. On my own block the parents met to play cards each night, and we kids played long games of hide and seek until they finally looked up and said "Would you look at the time!" Everyone knew everyone else and were friends. I've carried the whole Norman Rockwell impression of what a neighborhood should look like in my memory banks all these years, never once realizing it was a picture and no longer reality...until I moved to Blue Springs.
So what’s so wrong with Noman Rockwell? Is the man a myth or a legend? Perhaps both. His forty years of creating illustration covers for the Saturday Evening Post were iconic in developing a national consciousness in spirit, if not in fact. Rockwell was inspired by FDR’s famous speech on Four Freedoms and created masterpieces depicting each of those four themes—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, freedom from want. The first two of these are Constitutional givens, the latter are ideals from which we may become inspired to create healthier neighborhoods. Actually, I find myself especially interested in freedom from want.
What does that mean to you? Take a moment and write down your answer on a slip of paper…don’t worry, it’s not a test! It’s just a way of responding without influence. I don’t think President Roosevelt meant having every little wish gratified, but rather, humane living conditions with social intervention in dire situations. Now that’s something I can get behind.
One thing I learned in our recent lockdown is that I needfar less than I was spending. Without going places, without eating out, withoutshopping, our reserves grew. We had more to share, and that is where therubber hits the road. We cannot legislate goodness of heart, nor mandate aspirit of giving. We only govern our own hearts and homes, and sometimes that’sa challenge, right? What we can do is adjust our lifestyles in cognizance ofthe needy, and give as led. That fulfills my ideal of freedom from want.
Norman Rockwell took these panoramic concepts and created images of the common man. His characters were seldom beautiful people, they resembled grandmas and grandpas and working men across the nation. We could relate to them, look up to them and emulate their examples. He was himself a Rockwell. Painting himself into various story lines, he caricaturized his own foibles and made himself more the man, less the legend.
If I could have one thing happen in Blue Springs, it would be a Norman Rockwell Thanksiving for the whole community, and feel the love he brushed to life in every one of his canvases. He may have been famous for his Thanksgiving pictures, but I think his greatness is measured in the ways his life remains reflected in neighborhoods like good old Blue Springs.
