Love thy neighbor........NOT

We're blessed with good neighbours. Well, on one side anyhow. I have new ones on the other whom i've not met yet. Then over the road, well, they seem like nice enough guys but like the rest of the street, believe that you too would like to listen to their music! Neighbourly behaviour in our cities falling victim to busy working lives, migratory lifestyles, those as in the case of where i live, who believe it's their right to inflict their lifestyle on you, and our fear of getting involved.
Our bid for affluence means we are staying shorter periods in the one area, and our long work days means chatting over the fence has become a time-waster of the past.
Fear of crime has put bars on our windows in many capital cities, fortunately for me i live in a low crime /no crime place, where i can still leave my handbag and car keys in full view.....oh yeah and my mobile phone, and still have it all there when i come from work. However, i live in the minority.
Two incidences in the past fortnight should stop us in our tracks.
The tale of a 71-year-old man who sat dead in his car in Melbourne for nine days, without being noticed, should shock us. A parking inspector even placed an infringement notice on the car's tinted windows.
The second case, which involved the death of an elderly woman in Sydney, is equally distressing. That poor woman starved to death after her son who was her sole carer died in a fall, police believing she may have lay in her home for up to a month before neighbours raised an alarm.
While recriminations fly across dinner tables over who is responsible in these cases, the real culprit remains at large. Surely, we're all at fault, and the blame should be shared between policy-makers, community leaders and ourselves.
Our legislators need to start putting a premium on the role of community in decision-making; our school, church and company leaders need to put more focus on kinship, and as individuals, we need to value communication more, and isolation less.
The Victorian Government, shocked at the case in its state, has ordered an inquiry to find out how a city could be too busy to notice a dead man, sitting in his car, night and day for more than a week.
And in Sydney, community leaders are trying to Polyfilla the cracks in a city that allowed one elderly woman's life – or death – to go unnoticed for so long.
But those two tragedies need to lead to a wider debate about the role we should play in helping each other. They are extreme examples, but less obvious illustrations of our growing isolation are on-show every day.
We can buy our groceries on-line, not venturing into the supermarket, correspond by e-mail, and acknowledge birthdays and anniversaries with e-cards over telephone calls.
We can work from home, by ourselves, and fill our leisure time with thousands of songs stored on our mini iPods, without talking to another person.
And there's another, more dangerous example of the lack of neighbourliness in our communities, with homeowners continuing to refuse to fence their backyard pools.
An employee of the Queensland local government department – the agency responsible for drafting safe pool laws – recently had a pool installed, and was shocked by the advice offered by a builder: just pull it down as soon as the council inspector has approved it.
The pool fencing laws brought in 14 years ago have been credited with making neighbourhoods safer, with the Queensland injury surveillance unit believing the lives of more than 70 toddlers have been saved.
Still, four bus loads of children – almost 160 – under the age of five have drowned in the past decade, and half of them occurred in backyard swimming pools.
But despite public campaigns, government crackdowns, and even councils being given the ability to raise revenue by issuing on-the-spot $525 fines for non-compliant fences, some local authorities are not bothering to police the law, and some residents just don't care. Brains in their arses if you ask me.
Letters pour into MPs' offices, with people objecting to fencing their pools on aesthetic grounds and the Government is now looking at ways to force them to consider the safety of children in their area.
Sources say the Government will soon consider requiring councils to keep records of pool building and that property owners wanting to sell their homes will need a compliance certificate for their pool.
Cabinet is still to discuss that move, but it is understood to be the favoured option.
The Government cannot make us talk to our neighbours, but it can make it hard for those in our neighbourhoods who ignore the safety of our children – and if pool compliance certificates are the means of doing that, it's surely the neighbourly thing to do.
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I still have NO air conditioning :( the tradesman came out and knew exactly what was needed, so now i have to wait for parts to arrive, then he has to come out and install it........4 weeks.....ggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
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No writing for NANOWRIMO today, how depressing, my total word count still stands at
2,719.

till next time, Michelle.