Lessons from Replacing My Smashed Mailbox

Are people basically good?

Last week, my wife called me using our landline’s intercom system:

“Some woman just ran over our mailbox. She’s just standing there looking at it.”

My wife’s office is on the second floor of our house. Kind of like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, she sees everything from her office chair.¹ Down here in the basement, I see nothing. I ran upstairs.

Sure enough, our box was completely fustigated. Our neighbors’ pole was still up, but their box was down too.

I was just getting on my shoes and coat to go outside when the woman came to the door. It was bitterly cold outside, and I insisted she come in. She was very upset.

She apologized profusely. She told us she was only going 10–15 miles per hour.

We believed her. Low temperatures + precipitation = black ice. It’s easy to lose traction and become a projectile. You can see from the tire tracks how she just lost it.

She apologized some more. She was obviously freaked out. I tried to inject a little perspective: “You weren’t hurt. You didn’t hurt anyone else. It’s just a mailbox and a car mirror. It’s just things.”

I also reminded her in a subsequent conversation—in which she was again apologizing profusely—that she had the decency to come to our door. Some would have just driven off.

I won’t go into the details of how she made us whole. She did, enabling me to buy the materials and do the work to erect a nice new mailbox. Some pictures from that process are below for your enjoyment.

A number of good things came from this event.…

Believe it or not, these same mailboxes were hit by another driver within the last ten years. No black ice that day. Dollars to donuts that driver—a teen—was texting. Her dad made us whole too…though there was less to do that time because the damage was not as severe. Still, here in 2024, both mailboxes had seen better days, so it was nice to get a new one.

I got to hang out with my across-the-street neighbor. He and his wife are lovely, kind people. We’re not really hang-out friends, but we collect each others’ mail on trips and talk about the Yankees and stuff. I am a bit younger, so I have helped out with a few physical tasks here and there over the years. They are good neighbors.

He asked me if he could use some of the parts from my old mailbox post in order to redo his. I was happy to oblige. I would have happily helped him install an upgrade to what he had, but he wanted to just frankenstein his all back together. That’s cool. I was glad to work with him in the warm sun.

I also got to meet some new neighbors…

Late February and March are rather fickle around here: Black ice one day, a gorgeous day the next…and then, a week later, you’re digging out from 20 inches of snow. Yesterday actually made it to 70 degrees. Naturally, people in our neighborhood—liberated from winter’s icy grip at last—were out for walks.

Everyone stopped to talk about mailboxes, skidding cars, and sunshine. I didn’t mind that all the stopping and starting stretched the work out until just after the sun had gone down. It was a hoot chatting with everyone.

One neighbor said that the fact that the woman had come to our door, rather than just driving off, had “restored her faith in humanity.”

In reply, I suggested the possibility that humans might actually seem worse than we are. As an example, I noted that the vast majority of crime is committed by a tiny portion of the population, who keep offending over and over.

Then, recalling a chapter and chart from my book, I offered the possibility that human morality may be on a normal-distribution bell curve: A minuscule number of monsters and angels, a small number of really good and really bad, and most everyone else clustered around the mean. If that is so, then most people would be basically decent. Not amazingly good or terribly bad, but manageably decent.

Here is a representation of that notion, from Chapter 9 of The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right, installments of which I am currently releasing here.

So what do you think? Is this a plausible way of representing the range of human morality?

Do you agree with Hobbes that we’re all bullies and cowards, and the only thing keeping us from clubbing each other is a strong “sovereign”?

Do you agree with Rousseau, that we’re naturally good and compassionate, and those inclinations are ruined by the rise of societal institutions?

Or do you agree with Locke, that most people are not amazingly good, but they’re decent enough, and the barrel is spoiled by a few rotten apples?

Or do you have some other idea altogether? Do share!

1. At first, I had Vertigo rather than Rear Window. Thank you to Jacqueline Rendell for the reminder/correction.