God Help People Who Mean Well

Today was bad. I mean, really bad. My Volksie's battery wouldn't start; my neighbor Bud said the cables leading in were completely corroded. He and another neighbor gave me a jump start, and I thankfully scurried off to Sear's ("where America shops,") ostensibly to buy a new battery. Um, no. They couldn't deal with foreign cars with this type of wiring: I had to go to a real Volkswagon Dealer. (I honestly think my hamster could file those wires better than some mechanics.) To make a short story long, the car is still there. "Have a shot or two of tequila," my boyfriend wisely advised when I arrived home via a ride from the dealership.
Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, I stepped outside, shot glass in hand, admiring the pinkening sky, delighted that this day resembling more of a haul up Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima was almost over, I noticed that the dahlias...my dahlias...they had just sprouted leaves...were gone.
My neighbor (another neighbor, not Bud, certainly no Bud of mine), without my knowledge or my consent, dug up my dahlias. Oh, I saw her working in what I am now sure she considers "her yard," and I approached her to ask whether she happened to know about the missing plants surrounding the hydrangea bushes that had just begun to stretch out and greet the sun from their tubules. "I thought they were some type of potato," she stammered, visibly uncomfortable at being "caught."
We live in an apartment building, and this woman with an evidently orange prefrontal cerebral cortex seems to think that she owns all of the land around it. She plants flowers, rakes, trims, and cultivates. She loves gardening, and it shows. However, purportedly, dahlias look like potatoes to her wandering-over-the-hoe eyes. (Do dahlias look like potatoes to you? Seriously.) "I live here," I gently intoned to her. "Oh!" she let out a raspy, reeking, smoker-compromised exclamation, as if the idea never had occurred to her. "Um, what happened to them?" I asked, about as politely as Hillary Clinton. "Well, they're here," she said with growing irritation, pointing to an earthenware pot on the patio outside her door. "Thanks so much for saving them!," I said breezily. "I'm going to go get a bag. I'll just scoop 'em right up. I'll be right back..."
The genuine desire to help a fellow human being in need, such as my neighbors who helped me because my battery cables were fried, is an admirable trait and deserves much more praise than I give here, precisely because it's genuine. Let's call it the desire to liberate another; the human interest to see and set someone else free (that certainly works well with Independence Day nearly upon us). Maybe even, call it love (don't get emotional on me here); at the very least, call it decency. Conversely, the burning need to own something--a little land, something that grows, a life--is likely so great in some people (call it codependence?) that their sense of "meaning well" starts to look suspiciously like a disguised sense of personal entitlement, grows exponentially into the cancerous "I needas, the I wannas, and the I gotta haves," and ultimately bursts all boundaries of respect and protocol, remains unchecked to astoundingly mutate and metastasize in my apparently potato-filled space.