As I compose my first column of the New Year it would be great to write about something potentially uplifting – dare I say inspirational?

That is not going to be the case.

Instead recent actions in my neighborhood have caused me to consider once again the narrow-mindedness of my fellow humans in his and her pursuit of fulfilling their immediate and selfish goals.

The other day my wife looked out the window to see a neighbor come out of his house to address the issue of a tire that was on his sidewalk. Now how this lonely tire wound up on his sidewalk is anyone’s guess. If you live in a city neighborhood you know that these things can happen.

Now if it had happened to us I would have collected the tire and placed it with the ones I’ve got that will be planters in our backyard this spring.

My neighbor doesn’t think like that, though. He took the tire, set it up right and gave it a shove, causing it to roll down the sidewalk, across a street, and up onto the sidewalk of a nearby house, where it eventually rested.

He went into his house apparently content in the knowledge that he had solved this problem of unwanted debris.

Now we wondered what would happen next. The tire sat there for several hours and then it was gone.

Lucky the Wonder Bichon required his walk so we bundled ourselves up and went out. During the course of the constitutional we found the tire. The next bunch of neighbors had removed it from its new place on their sidewalk and placed it on an empty lot.

Now, I will get the tire and bring it to my back yard because it will sit at that location from now until I’m dead, most likely.

I will admit my first thought was waiting until dark, grabbing the tire and returning it to my neighbor’s sidewalk. That wouldn’t be prudent, though.

In this campaign year when issues of great import are being tossed about willy-nilly no one is asking this question: Why can’t people do the right thing? Especially when the right thing takes so little effort or thought?

I’ve got a dead microwave oven in my garage. Now I could take it down to the vacant lot and leave it there. Or I could call the city and have it disposed of properly. I’m going to do the latter as it’s easier, frankly.

Another neighbor has a dog chained permanently in his backyard, which abuts ours. Apparently in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this kind of behavior is not considered cruel, but any reasonable dog owner knows that it is.

My wife and I were very concerned the other night about this dog that was barking and crying when the temperature plummeted to single digits. We made some calls and hopefully the dog was brought inside.

Again, the right thing is the easy step to take. Bring the dog inside when it is cold.

Now, if you share these stories with anyone, it’s easy to find out that behaviors such as this are all too common. Too many people just don’t want to make an effort and they care less about how their actions affect others.

And no, before I get the letters, it’s not “the liberals” fault. I didn’t have a single schoolteacher who advocated selfish or counter-productive behaviors as I described here.

It is sometimes difficult for me to take heated discussions of complex issues such as illegal immigration seriously when citizens have a hard time properly addressing how to dispose of an unwanted tire or a broken appliance.

If you want a better New Year, if you yearn for a more peaceful productive society, then you have to start at the ground level: the neighborhood.

Thankfully, we have city governments that are addressing such issues in the best ways they can, but the real effort is up to individuals, some of who will never see the importance of doing the right and easy thing.

Agree? Disagree? Drop me a line at news@thereminder.com or at 280 N. Main St., East Longmeadow, MA 01028. As always, this column represents the opinion of its author and not the publishers or advertisers of this newspaper.