Kenneth Elder's Blog

The View From Philly

A hazy view from the nation’s birthplace

Spring was a few days away, and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter was preparing to present his budget to City Council. The city’s financial situation was, and still is, in dire need of restructuring. Officials have recommended courses of action that seem harsh, draconian, entirely ineffable. The city faces hundreds of millions of dollars in budget deficits in the coming years. To cope, Nutter has proposed budget cuts and tax increases that will be painful reminders of the economic state of this city.

Philadelphia is two-faced. One of its faces is the radiant, cheerful visage of a town that attracts New Yorkers seeking shorter, more manageable commutes, cheaper rent, and lower costs of living. They seek a calmer and smaller city filled with lovely parks, a network of quality private schools, a deep and meaningful history, and plenty of fun activities.

On the other half of that clean-cut image lie the grimy streets of Kensington, the heroine markets, the unbelievably high illiteracy rate, joblessness and poverty. Center City’s parks are ghostly doppelgangers of Strawberry Mansion’s dope-filled playgrounds. Illegal gun sales threaten the safety of communities and gang violence establishes itself insidiously in our neighborhoods

We have only one say in all of this. We vote. Then we hand the work over to someone else.

At first, the politicians that we vote for are mysteries. They are vague forms that make promises on television and accuse each other of hypocrisy, greed and corruption. They paint pretty pictures of themselves and urge us to vote for them, saying that they will impose measures that will bring the city out of its problems.

This endless cycle is one that we are each familiar with in our own way. Some of us turn our cheeks and stand on pedestals and preach about the buried corruption that lies unearthed, corruption cases like the $62,000 in tools given to the disgraced former state Senator Vince Fumo, or the FBI wiretapping of former Mayor John Street’s office. Some of us research our political picks, and through careful deliberation come to rational conclusions, forming a foundation of reasons for why we place our votes. Some of us choose to avoid the mess altogether.

But most of us vote, and we research, and we hope that our vote will be the right one, that the person we are voting for will work hard in office for us and for our neighbors and for our neighborhood’s neighbors, because we, as individuals, are single voices in a collective body of people crying out for something other than this. We must be certain and confident that those we send to office, those politicians, are the ones we want fighting our city’s fight.

This is the View From Philly. It is clouded and hazed but holds promise. It looks deep into the 2010 election cycle and analyzes our city’s needs, desires and critical stake in state governance. It asks what politicians intend to do about those urban and metropolitan issues that are so often ignored in national elections. This blog is your blog, written by someone with a stake in this city, someone who has chosen to make this historic and revered birthplace of a nation his permanent home. Safe, clean, clear and steady, this is the View From Philly.