My Neighbor Is Not My Enemy

What it takes to craft a better future, in a world hell bent on ending itself.

Chicago No Kings Protest - June 2025. Sign that reads, “I Love Immigrants Like Jesus Does.” another sign that says, “No ICE, No Fa(s)cist USA”, and another sign that says, “Keep Abortion Legal.”

It isn’t an unreal expectation to want people to be better, to do better.

I used to get so passionately angry, when I was a teenager, sitting around the living room arguing with adults 20 years my senior, about the state of the world as I saw it then… much to my heartbreak, it is no better now than it was then. Arguably, it is worse.

Back then… it was harsh words, incomplete knowledge, an inability to back up what I knew to be true, but didn’t know how to express.

It was a harsh truth, to know that back then morals felt like something everyone expected you to lose.

It was an odd life, to go to church, to be in a private Christian school, to be surrounded by all the pillars of a God that everyone touted a belief in, and yet the lived experience that I had was unaligned with the truth that I found in the knowledge of the God I was taught.

How could we know the very stories of Jesus, and not see our way into repeating those acts in our own lives? How was it possible to see that Jesus fed the masses with little, and not realize that we were called to feed the masses with whatever we had? How could we see Jesus flipping tables in the temple marketplace, and not see the way he would turn his back in furious righteous rage at mega-churches? How could we see the way in which Saul turned to Paul, and not see the fundamental truths that come from silence, the wisdom that is gained, and the faith that comes when turning from wealth and instead finding security in the loving embrace of God? How could we learn the stories of Job, and not see that heartbreak wasn’t a punishment of God, but instead it was a trust? That God trusts us so much, that He knows those would will only find firmer footing in Him when it all seems so harsh and overwhelming?

There were countless stories of love, devotion, community, care, righteous rage, and faith in the book that I read, that it was hard to have those impassioned arguments with my family wherein they took what felt like glee in letting me know, “in time you will come to understand that what you want and what is real, are two different things.” Or “as you get older you’ll understand that all those things you want, mean higher taxes, and you’ll learn what fiscal responsibility means.” Or “You are too young to understand what you are saying.”

As if, it was not only expected, but a right of passage to give up our ethics, our morals, our faith as the years are added to our lives. As if, every birthday, the anticipation would be that one day, I would wake and think, “why yes… poor people deserve to starve, homeless people don’t deserve a warm bed at night, and the wealthy actually shouldn’t have to pay the taxes that they are avoiding…”

It seems truly absurd, in retrospect, that I was looked at with something akin to scorn and derision, when in reality, it was and should’ve been the other way around.

I think back to the arguments that I had with my uncle, the man with whom I have been oil to his fire, and he has been water to my drowning lungs. We’ve never gotten on well, two type A+ people, hardly find joy in both seeing themselves as right, while both being so unable to hear the other person.

The most tumultuous argument that I ever had with him, was during a particularly difficult time in his life, that I wasn’t privy to, and one where I was also holding on by a thread. I don’t particularly remember what it was that triggered the vitriol that left his mouth, or the blatant disregard and disrespect that left mine, but at the end of it all, with my grandmother clucking her tongue at both of us, he said what turned out to be some of the most important words ever uttered to me:

“Has it ever occurred to you, that if you just shut your mouth sometimes, people might have an opportunity to hear what you had to say? Did it ever occur to you, that if you spoke to people like they aren’t the scum of the earth, they may in fact hear what you are saying, and not immediately take offense?”

To be honest, no. It hadn’t occurred to me.

I remember being so dumbfounded when he said it. I ended up walking the neighborhood well into the evening that night, wondering just what to do with that nugget of wisdom.

I was right, wasn’t I? To be furious, and disappointed, and disgusted with the elders in my life who were still clinging so tightly to their conservative ways? I had every right to see them as beneath me, under me in terms of morals and ethics, people who were not worthy of respect.

It wasn’t until that evening that I realized the wisdom in the phrase, “You’ll catch more bees with honey than vinegar.”

Bathroom wall in a restaurant in Bucktown, Chicago. Sticker in center reads, “What would love do?”

My family noticed my reticence after that evening to join in political or religious discussions. My uncle baited me, as if his formal occupation was fishing and I was a prized sea bass.

But something had shifted in me, and I didn’t find that I had any fight left in me.

Or rather, I had a different kind of fight in me. Something mature had awoken in the wake of the fire of adolescent emotionality.

I realized several things in quick succession that caused me to change not only the way in which I communicated with others, but fundamentally changed the way in which I lived my life.

• · I hadn’t really been studying any of the things in which I believed, I just had foundational truths, but no knowledge to back it up – thus, I began to study in earnest, the shape of the world that I found myself living in.

• · I hadn’t ever really done anything to combat the very things that I spent hours and hours arguing over – thus, I dove into doing the work. Working with non-profits, starting community cleaning groups, working directly in food insecurity programs, etc.

• · I found that arguing for the sake of argument wasn’t as fruitful as it had always felt, and in reality it replaced actually doing anything to make a difference – thus, I rarely ever spent time debating what I believed in, and rather spent time listening to what others were saying to better understand what to study, to better understand how they came to their conclusions.

• · I never gave people a chance to express themselves in a safe way – choosing instead to often berate them and demean them – thus, I learned that the very Jesus I had been using to shame others, was also not living in me in the way that I had been so very arrogantly asserting he had.

Over time, I began to understand that people are flawed, and compassion is hard. I learned that most people are good people, but time does a number on our souls – that the longer we live in societies that are structured around capitalism and isolationism, we lose something fundamental in our human connections.

Islam is beautiful in that one of the most profound statements that was ever uttered about this life we’ve been given, was from a Muslimah in my life who said “Yes, life is a gift, but the dunya is a prison that keeps us from our Maker, our true home.” How true, when you realize the longer we are here, the harder it is to hold on to the Divine innocence that we are born with.

• I learned that sometimes people say things, but they don’t mean them.

• I learned that sometimes people say things, because they have forgotten that they can know one thing, and still yearn for another.

• I learned that sometimes, people do still want a better world, they just got out of the practice of hoping for it.

• I learned that sometimes, people are just tired, and scared, and it’s easier to sit in anger, than it is to sit in fear.

I learned that even a conservative uncle that has lived in Texas the vast and overwhelming majority of his life, can over time become a liberal, and that in time it looks like he may-well become a leftist (though perish the thought of me actually saying that out loud… no matter how proud I am of him.)

I think one of the fundamental truths of the world is that we are all ignorant, and that wisdom is understanding that we are all starting from a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding. I am not some wizened elder, though I hope to one day be one. But I do know that we are surrounded by wisdom, founts of knowledge and lived experience in the very people that we are living amongst.

If you find yourself in a small town in Texas, or West Virginia, or Washington, you’ll find the community that you think couldn’t possibly be there, just as you would in major cities like Chicago, New York, or San Francisco.

The truth is, we are all just holding on for dear life. We’ve all been lied to, and told that we aren’t to expect better, that we shouldn’t waste our time wanting something that the systems weren’t designed to give, and that the systems are so big that there is no point in wanting something that the systems cannot be changed to give you.

The truth is, I think a lot of people are a lot better than we give them credit for, and that the hope that some people have, has been squashed thoroughly in others.

The truth, as much as it is hard to believe it, is that for some – perhaps even most, they are good people, who have been taught that they should give up what little of their goodness they had, just to survive.

That in order to continue living, to give a life to their children, to care for their partners, to live long enough to get to an era of rest, that they have to sacrifice any relationship to morals, ethics, honor, and faith.

For some, they’ve been taught that faith and life are two things that are mutually exclusive.

We have to do better, and be better.

We have to live with radical compassion, in the face of a world that would tell us that compassion is a waste of time.

For if we, those who have found a way through exhaustion, through the systemic attempts at soul death, have kept on to our hope – then who are we to continue trying to squash it in others?

Are we not also then tools of the oppressor?

If we want a better world, are we not then obligated to do what it takes to bring that about?

We imagine war, and death, we imagine rage, and anger, we imagine blood and honor.

And I would be a fool to not agree that those things are real and happening and will continue to happen.

Yet, the truth, harsh as it is to state, is that a better world will not come if all we are doing is allowing death and anger to get us there.

For those of us of faith, we have ample evidence of our prophets who practiced love and rage, who practiced care and harm, who wielded the tenuous balance of hope and despair.

We must find the things that tie us to our perceived enemies. We must find a way to bring a collective back together. We must bind ourselves to the concept of humanity, rather than the ideology of disillusionment.

Imagine a world on the other side of it all, and tell me that you imagine it will only be “the good ones”… who are they? What are they?

Follow that logic to its natural conclusion. If you imagine it will only be X people, or Y people, then what do you imagine to have happened to all the rest?

If you hate a particular person, then congratulations, you are human.

If you hate a particular PEOPLE, then congratulations, you are a racist.

There is nothing about anything happening that is okay, and to want a better world is beautiful, it speaks to something in you that is vital to the on-going existence of the human experiment that God is running.

Yet the reality is, you will not get to the ‘better’, if your only path there is hate and violence.

I believe that righteous anger is an obligate to a better world, inasmuch as I believe that radical love is.

Both of those concepts are not mutually exclusive in praxis.

I do not believe that we will get to a better world through peaceful protest, but I do not believe that everyone who disagrees with me is my enemy.

I know that people have been raised steeped in dogma, inundated by propaganda, and overwhelmed by indoctrination. If that is the case, who am I to see them as the enemy? Would I not rather see those who crafted the lies they fell for as my enemy instead? Am I not obligated to fight on behalf of those who have fallen victim to the lies, inasmuch as those who have fallen victim to the death that comes from those lies?

My enemy isn’t in the blood found in the conservative bodies that make up red states, as much as it isn’t in the bone that stands in the liberal bodies that make up blue states.

My enemy is in the self-professed ‘leaders’ that lie and steal, cheat and harm, entrenched in double speak, and live in fantastical ideations of war and authority.

My enemy, in short, is the one that would see to making me believe my enemy is my neighbor.

Perhaps, if you gain anything from this essay, you might take away a foundational truth that I have made every attempt to live by:

“Sometimes the wise thing, is to stay silent; the smart thing, is to allow others to speak; the hard thing is to let love lead; and the easy thing is to have hope.”

X o x o – Jacks