This has been on my mind since we moved to Manchester, meaning I’ve been thinking about it on and off for the past year and a half or so.

I’ve lived in apartment complexes for the past 6 years. I feel like I’ve seen a wide variety of neighboring tenants. In Albuquerque, a group of guys lived below me and played their music too loudly. A couple lived next to me and had a folding chair on the balcony we shared, each of them smoking or clipping their nails less than 3 feet from my door. The complex in Boulder was amazingly quiet and clean; I don’t think we had a single disturbance from any of our neighbors, and we didn’t disturb them. In Manchester, the couple that lived above us tramped and ran across their apartment, and you could hear every thudding footstep. Some guys across the street blared their music throughout the night on multiple occasions. Here in Tucson, there are dogs everywhere in this complex, and the neighbor below us has one that, one night, barked almost constantly from midnight to 4 a.m. And many neighbors don’t clean up after their dogs in the grass out front.

These are noise and other complaints that I bitched about constantly, yet in the grand scheme of things, they’re not a big deal. They bothered me, and still do, but they’re minor issues at best.

Now, I have to talk about a couple of major issues that actually disturbed me and continue to. These are the ones that have been on my mind.

The first was the couple that lived below us in Manchester. It started with them. They had two kids, a girl no older than 10 and a boy around 2, and they had two dogs as well. The dogs were relatively quiet, only piping up and barking when the man got home from work. However, the couple were both screamers. They screamed at each other, at the dogs… at their kids.

Look, I’m not a parent yet. It might not be my place to talk about how people raise their children. But be me. Be sitting on the couch working on the laptop or maybe up and around doing chores, sometimes listening to music over a speaker, other times enjoying the silence. And all of the sudden, rising from the floorboard, such phrases as “Shut the fuck up”,”Go to your fucking room”, and “I fucking hate you” reach your ears. A man and a woman, both yelling at the top of their lungs, at either one another, their pets, or their kids. I’ll remind you that they had a toddler. Doors usually slam, someone stamps across the apartment, and children scream and cry.

One time, out near our cars, I overheard the man telling another guy that he had to lock one of the kids in their room.

He made no attempt to lower his voice, knowing that I was present. He didn’t think to keep that information to himself until I went back inside. He just declared it to this guy like it was nothing.

The second came to my attention yesterday. I heard every word of an argument from the neighbors beside us. This is also a couple with two kids, a girl and boy–although both of them are pre-teen, I’d say. I think they were still at school when this happened. I pray that they were. When I walked outside, I had smelled their parents smoking marijuana, which I won’t judge. I honestly prefer that smell to the smell of tobacco.

When I got back inside, the screaming match began. The woman started rattling off insults, cursing her husband/boyfriend/whichever to high heaven. She accused him of being lazy, claiming that she had to do everything herself, and she threatened to leave him. The man responded in kind, calling her a slew of names and telling her to shut up. He said that, like last time, she didn’t mean any of it.

I wouldn’t put my ear against the wall to listen to this sort of stuff, and in this case, I didn’t have to.

The fight stopped abruptly after a few minutes. I didn’t hear anyone storm out the door and down the stairs. I didn’t hear any doors slam inside either. I stood there, wondering exactly how that ended. Did they just go back to smoking, moving on with their day? Were they going to forget about it until it came up again in the future?

I was baffled.

How… do couples treat one another this way? How do parents treat their children that way? Why would they raise their voices to the point of shrieking at people they’re supposed to love and protect? In public, most people don’t scream at total strangers, much less scream at their spouses. Even if parents are out and about, a lot of them usually don’t shout at their kids unless they’re getting too far ahead. That’s merely calling out to them. Even if parents look to punish their kids in public, they lower their voices instead of raising them. Maybe I haven’t seen enough of these interactions to really say for sure.

Once it’s behind closed doors, though, back in the privacy of their own homes, it seems as though the cork on the bottle pops off, and everyone explodes. They let their feelings flow, and it flies in the face of any kind of respect and love they have for the person or animal in front of them.

And they think no one else can hear.

The way people treat their spouse and the way they treat their child and pet: those are the couple of issues I have a serious problem with.

I can’t possibly know the inner workings of anyone else’s life. No one’s perfect; humans are painfully flawed. And there’s no clear-cut solution for everything.

But I write all of this in the hope that I get a simple message across: just be kind. Be nice to everyone you come into contact with, especially the people you care about most. I don’t care if it’s in a private or public place: if you have a disagreement, the last thing you should do is scream, even in the heat of the moment. That outburst stays with you, it stays with the person you’re screaming at, and it stays with all the people around you listening in, despite the fact that they don’t want to. Everyone who hears it carries that specific scar, whether it’s for the next few days or the years ahead.

Love your loved ones, and love thy neighbor, particularly in the times we’re living in. It starts with every single one of us on an individual level. Be better. Do better.