Neighborhood Battles

Life in a cul-de-sac can have its difficulties. Our next-door neighbor from our left side called today asking us to remove our basketball hoop from the sidewalk in front of our house, because neighbor kids from our right side have been so nasty to them in their use of it. Of course they all have complaints against the other; the parents accuse the other neighbors of lying, and it's tough to be in between them. Things are escalating, too; the kids have been egging our neighbors' house and spitting at their new car, and police have been called in.
The frustrating thing is that when the children misbehave, it isn't something that their parents will address, because the parents accept no definition of wrong unless it is any perceived offense against themselves. One of the parents was even yelling unprovoked cruelties across the cul-de-sac at our neighbor in front of his own kids--what an example. Now all the kids in the neighborhood have sided with the offending kids and think our next-door neighbors are mean. Almost all. Tim tells them that our neighbors are nice.
The kids have actually lost an opportunity by their nasty behavior. Since Tim is on good terms with the offended neighbors, they spoil him at every turn of events. They've given him various little favors and at holidays bestow things like hermit crabs and posters upon him.
Because of the difficulties, the neighborhood now will have no convenient basketball hoop to play with. Also by discussing the matter with the police, their widespread air-soft pellet gun use and street placement of hockey goals have also been discovered to be illegal. I don't think any of it would have been addressed except as a result of their nastiness; now they have to contain much of their play to their back yards. My mother would say that they cut off their noses to spite their faces. I think I agree.
It all goes back to the biblical fact that you sow what you reap. They and their parents have sown the wind; they will reap the whirlwind.
Job 4:8 According to what I have seen, those who plow iniquity and those who sow trouble harvest it.