Enforcing Peace

Neighbours can be a pain in the neck, and more often than not some of them force you to do something about them, of all people, whether you want it or not - and whether they want it or not. Peter's new neighbour, new for about six months at the time this happened and from whose perspective it was actually Peter to whom "new" would have to apply, was eager to ask him over for a drink after he'd been in the area for about a month.

(Microsoft Media)

Peter doesn't generally drink but he thought it might be a good idea to show neighbourly spirit, thinking it wouldn't happen all too often, anyway, and that there might be a reason of sorts, beyond the obvious of saying hello, which might as well have been done over the fence, for the invitation that could more or less easily be dealt with.

Here's to good neighbours, the man uttered after a while of small talk, in the understandable hope of not being bothered by Peter too much. Well, Peter thought, it looked pretty much as if he wasn't going to be bothered by his neighbour either, and the latter could have had this result as far as Peter was concerned anyway, even without a glass of beer.

Alas, the neighbour's dog, an aggressive and noisy little automaton, performing the same annoying antics over and over again, meaning deafeningly bark at just about anyone in Peter's garden at any given time of the day or night, as if at the press of a button, got in the way of good neighbourhood relations. When Peter asked his self-proclaimed "good neighbour" after a few days if he couldn't control his dog a bit since its behaviours was having a negative if not outright unhealthy effect on life on Peter's side of the fence, the neighbour self-importantly answered he couldn't do anything about it and that Peter was going to have to live with it.

(Microsoft Media)

What a good neighbour this is, Peter thought. Luckily, he knew what he could do about the situation and bought himself a dog chaser to pay the beast back until, necessarily and unavoidably bullied into submission already by Peter's very footsteps after a while, conditioned much like Pavlov's salivating dog, it stopped barking at him, preferred to run away at the mere sight of Peter, and finally also let him sleep at night.

Peter realised that the ultrasound a dog chaser emits was at least as painful to a dog as its barking was to him - or any other peace-loving fellow being. Sometimes, yes, peace has to be enforced, Peter concluded. And weren't there many parallels between micro- and macro-politics.