Why is it this vox pop piece ends up taking a fairly negative view of neighbors? Underneath Andrew Walsh’s photo of an uninviting wooden barrier between two back yards there’s a caption, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Is Walsh’s skepticism about neighbors a result of his interviewees being from bustling Seattle, rather than from a possibly friendlier, more laid-back city like Omaha?

Despite platitudinous comments from ordinary folk about how a good neighbor is “someone you can count on and who counts on you,“ the lily is gilded with frost. Speaking of “frost,” Robert Frost, in his poem, “Mending Wall,” countered the venerable saying, “Good fences make good neighbors,” with his very own adage, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” In fact, the notion of a “neighborhood” as an enclave of people who know one another’s names and who are available to lend each other a cup of sugar – well, that notion is one of the most comforting myths we cling to.

Because Walsh lets his Emerald City dwellers hold forth without any comments from him, his two-minute voice montage doesn’t go beyond predictable parameters. Perhaps a few sage words from Walsh might have broken through the veneer of such descriptions of a good neighbor as someone who “is not loud, doesn’t have a party at 2 a.m.” Not that this piece should refer to the fall of the Berlin Wall or the disappearance of Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood. But I miss some sort of thoroughly secular, totally street-smart overarching concept here, such as “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”