In front, a colorful, festive invitation to a wine and cheese reception for residents on Thursday. Behind that, detailed news of the recent FBI warning of the possible plot to have terrorists occupy residential apartments and rig them with explosives.

At first, I was mildly outraged -- yes, I've already seen some cursory notice of the FBI warning in local media, but isn't this bit of communication important enough to double-check that you've reached everyone?

Ultimately, my mind settled into a more deeply troubling question: assuming something "out of the ordinary" did happen in my building, would I know?

My building is on the whole remarkably secure and safe, with electronic swipe devices at all of the entrances (which work at least most of the time), and two members of local law enforcement paid to live in the building. These and other features were trumpeted by the building management in their memo.

But these things aren't likely to be especially effective against this particular threat. One only notices the out-of-the-ordinary if one knows what "ordinary" is.

Apart from the friendly young entrepreneur woman who lived next door until recently, I don't know anyone in my building. How am I to know if something is amiss in the neighborhood if I don't know the neighborhood? Do I even have a neighborhood?

This is really the problematic difference between "them" and "us", terrorists and their victims.

Terrorists know each other -- their organizations are structured in tightly-knit, almost familial, cellular networks. Even where cells are unaware of each other, there's always a strong trusted link tying them to the rest of the network. Terrorists have one big neighborhood.

On the other hand, we in the U.S. have a government of disconnected bureaucracies, intelligence agencies that distrust each other implicitly, a government that distrusts the public, and a populace increasingly disconnected from the people and places in their immediate surroundings.

As effective group dynamics go, we're in a horrible place. The concepts of "neighborhood" and "cooperation" are becoming about as foreign in the U.S. as the concept of "class action litigation" would be in Zimbabwe.

I'm not sure what to do about it on the national level (and indeed I have little hope of improvement -- an Australian work visa is looking like an increasingly attractive option), but on the local level, however accidental the pairing of those two memos probably was, I think the silly wine and cheese party is a step in the right direction.

I hope I'm not the only one who shows up trying to build a little bit of a neighborhood.