A seven-year-old boy stood trembling in front of a car that had just screeched to a stop. A foot or two between them. Maybe less.
I had caused it.
Bonn, 2005. I was getting off a bus near my home on the Venusberg. More passengers were loading, so the bus wasn’t going anywhere. Instead of walking twenty feet to the marked pedestrian crossing, I cut directly in front of the bus. Long legs, quick look around the driver’s side, a car beginning to maneuver around — plenty of time to scoot across.
Barely across the street, I heard the screech. I pivoted. The boy was standing just in front of the car, frozen. He’d followed me. Done what I did. Crossed where I had crossed.
Had the driver reacted a half-second slower, that boy would be in a wheelchair. Or worse.
For seventeen years I had been one of those Americans who thought Germans were ridiculous about rules. I’d stood at crossings, watched the little red man glowing, seen no car far and wide, and watched Germans wait. Stiff. Still. Grim-faced. I’d crossed. Of course I’d crossed. Why wouldn’t I?
And at least a dozen times over those seventeen years, someone had barked at me. “Hey, are you color blind?” “Do you think you’re someone special?” And the one I never understood until that day: “Don’t you see that there are children standing here?”
German thinking goes like this: You are an adult. You know the rules. Official crossing points exist so drivers know to be careful there and pedestrians cross there — not wherever they feel like it.
Be a role model. If you cross at the marked points, you reinforce what children have been taught by their parents, their teachers, the crossing guards who volunteer near the Kindergartens every morning. If you don’t, children will be tempted to do the same. Possibly with tragic results.
For years, when barked at, I thought: mind your own business. Who made you a policeman? Those arrogant, busybody, know-it-all Germans, obeying silly rules like mindless slaves.
Until that day. Until that screech. Until that boy.
My son Daniel was also seven years old that year. Average height. Light as a feather. Tender. His grammar school was around the corner from our house — he didn’t need to cross a street to get there.
But on another day, in another part of Bonn, that seven-year-old boy could have been mine. And that car could have been another car. Not as quick to stop.
Germans are not inflexible because they lack imagination. In some cases, they are inflexible because they understand exactly what flexibility can cost.