A wise man once said that compromise is easy for those who aren't getting the short end of the stick. Honest hard-working folks ostensibly are. Call me old fashioned but I like, forgivably, working in places that become gentrified, where crime is kept low because of a heightened police presence. Consequently, if industry and hard work are rewarded instead of punished, Philadelphia becomes a more attractive place to live. Perhaps, less forgivably, I like paying less taxes not more and being able to keep more of what I earn. I like most of all, though erroneously and altogether unforgivably, being treated fairly and professionally even if I am a teacher and have among other things, summers off.
I don’t like living in places where life is mocked and made perilous by large flash mobs of children who glorify violence and death as societal goods, where the lesson they learn from their parents, their first teachers, is “irresponsibility”. Aisha Abdul Rahman became its latest victim earlier last week near her school. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of living amidst the skullduggery of neighborhood violence in a city with practically the highest murder rate in the industrialized world. If people aren't engaged in Philadelphia's favorite pastime of murdering each other, they're walking around with their right hands extended, in token of payment with palms upward. We deserve far better than having to abide in a city whose only fruits during the last four years are frustration and despair. The ubiquities of chaos and corruption are the harbingers of urban decline and the cascading arrays of violence and death follow with all alacrity.
People need to look out for each other by reporting suspicious activity. The culture of silence has run the quality of life here off the tracks and well nigh ruined it. Philadelphia has become a hotbed of moral decay where violence and death driven by a moral relativism where good and evil have become one. It need not be so and we can no longer let it.
People of vision unafraid to aspire to the cultural and moral grandeur to which they are capable are needed. So are those who realize large dreams including those of the heroic and dramatic. We had a great city once. We need in earnest to become proud of who we because of what we made and what we did. It’s not hard. This is the creed by which we as Americans in such full measure, have propelled our country on her path to greatness. Live it!
