Carlo Rotella: Walking to School 3/10

On weekday mornings I cross the T intersection at Beaconsfield Road and Dean Road in Brookline on the way to school with my kids. Cars coast through the stop sign there, and turn suddenly with blinkers unlit through packs of pedestrians. Drivers seem very busy: steering, braking, eating, drinking, talking on the phone, checking email, honking their horns. In many cases they're people who shouldn't be allowed to do any one of these things in public, let alone several at once.

On weekday mornings I'm reminded that if the world suddenly comes for you and yours, chances are that the agent of your destruction will not be one of the stock villains who take up so much space in our collective imagination. It won't be dastardly foreigners armed with advanced weapons. It won't be a scheming lone madman who has dreamed up a fresh form of serial evil. It'll probably be somebody a lot like yourself, only even worse at multi-tasking than you are.

After we cross the bridge over the D Line there's another three-way intersection. The kids wait for a break between the SUVs and minivans that drift blindly through the crosswalk, then they scuttle across, dragging their rolling backpacks.

Then we arrive at Clinton and Dean, where a traffic cop posted in the middle of the street supervises an oasis of reason and calm. Flows of kids and cars alternate in an orderly and courteous fashion. Regulars exchange good mornings. Just down the block is the Runkle School. It's overcrowded and in need of renovation, but it's a fine public school staffed by expert and dedicated teachers. It's the neighborhood's single most important institution, the one that does the most to bind into a community the various families streaming toward it from every direction.

In some circles, a tax-collecting government ranks up there with terrorists and child-snatchers as a leading hobgoblin. Too many of us indulge in the fantasy that paying taxes is a terrible imposition on our liberty. Anti-tax fulminators say, "Starve the beast," but this is what the beast actually looks like: a traffic cop, a good school, the scaffold on which community grows. If you want to see what starving the beast looks like, picture how the low-grade chaos at the other crossings would flower into out-and-out mayhem if that damn Big Government wasn't around to impede the God-given freedom of your fellow citizens to do as they please in their death-dealing privacy mobiles.