Police: T bus driver runs red light, plows into school bus in Egleston Square

Roxbury originally went west to Dedham. It originally included Brookline Village, Mission Hill, Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, and, yes, West Roxbury. However, it did not go all the way to Northampton Street, because that was under water and there was no Northampton Street.

Over time, the boundaries of what we recognize as Roxbury have changed not just once or twice, but continously. Of course, it doesn't really matter anymore because Boston almost as quickly as as the various areas removed themselves from Roxbury, Boston annexed them back and Roxbury no longer really exists at all.

Now if you're one of those people who thinks that Boston should remain divided neatly into neighborhoods by race, then of course it matters a great deal. At one point Roxbury was where we dumped the black people who showed up en masse 100 years after the Civil War, and where we did our damndest to ensure they stayed. Now all of a sudden, white people are moving back and oddly it's the black people themselves, who spent decades trying to get out of Roxbury, who now want to keep the white people out. And suddenly, the location of a boundary that changed several times in the 1870s matters to people who want to define Boston in the 2010s as it was in the 1970s.

But racial politics being fought by proxy using imaginary geographic boundaries are going to fail. Boston is not now, and never has been, a place that stands still. Each generation has lived in a Boston very different then the one their parents did. That includes everything from the total population, the racial and ethnic makeup, how we get around, what the major employers are, and even what we call the neighborhoods and where the boundaries are recognized.

Nothing is permanent in this city. Never has been, is not now, and does not show any signs of becoming so. Deal with it. We live in a society where people come and go and neighborhoods change, and our city is not immune to that.

That's all.