By Chris Satullo

The city I love was stunned this week by shattered glass, stinging smoke and spray-painted  scrawls.

Last Sunday, beneath a gleaming spring sky, my wife and I strolled down quiet Center City Philadelphia streets to bear witness to the “carnage” in our “battlespace.”

Paradoxes abounded.

The blocks of Chestnut and Walnut streets that had been hit the night before by fire and looting are well-known to us. In calmer times, I walk down them on my way home from work. We’ve done Christmas shopping at the stores whose eyes were now gouged out, reduced to glittering shards on the sidewalk. We know the store clerks whose jobs might now vanish, thanks to the one-two of virus and pillage.

Standing there, we grieved for them.

Yet, there was also relief. The night before, watching the semi-hysterical TV coverage, with its looping scenes of chaos, we’d been trained to expect much, much worse. Police strategies of containment actually had limited the damage mostly to a 2-by-2-block area, a speck even inside Philly’s compact downtown. This was awful for those who lived, worked or owned within that battered zone. But the truth was: Most of our sprawling city sat unharmed, peaceful beneath the azure sky. (To be sure, on succeeding nights, supermarkets, Targets, CVS-es and athletic stores scattered around town would feel the looter’s hand.)

And there was pride. Already that morning, crews of Philadelphians, refusing fear, upholding the diversity and verve of their city, were out in masks, with brooms, buckets and brushes, cleaning up the mess. An urban barn-raising.

And more paradox: We watched a crew of earnest millennials put their elbows into scrubbing spray-painted letters from the stone side of a bank building. An elderly black man watched them, impassively. I grimaced to think what he might be thinking. The letters they were erasing were BLM (Black Lives Matter). I silently wished this clean-up detail had skipped that one and gone after some of the profane scrawls down the street.

And rage: At the Municipal Services Building, an 18-story architectural crime across the street from grand old City Hall, a cordon of beefy cops stood guard around a statue of Frank Rizzo, a former Philly mayor and top cop, our city’s Trump: racist, bullying, divisive, incompetent, still an icon to some. Some uniforms had apparently gotten up early to clean graffiti off the statue of their hero, even as nearby merchants and residents awaited their attention. Infuriating.

Yet, a sign of hope, not the apocalypse: A couple days later, the Rizzo statue was gone, taken down overnight on orders from Mayor Jim Kenney, who has always shown a remarkably progressive spirit for an Irish kid raised on the streets of South Philly.

Throughout the week, my wife and I fielded messages from distant friends who know we live just yards from the “Rocky steps.” They asked:  Are you OK? 

We’d thank them but reply: Nah, we’re fine. Not because we’re so brave and steely; we’re not.  Not because sirens didn’t wail past our house at night; not because we didn’t startle at flash-bangs going off nearby. They did and we did.

But because we knew our vast, big-hearted city – with far more people who thirst for justice and community than people who’ll seize any opening to score a smart TV or dope sneakers – would survive this eruption. We don’t need Donald Trump’s toxic hysteria or a visit from the 82d Airborne to get through this. Despite the pain, loss, rage and missteps of the last week, Philly’s got this. We’re stronger than this storm.

What we want now from our nation is to drop its pornographic obsession with Philly’s broken glass – and the Twin Cities’, and Louisville’s, and D.C.’s, the Big Apple’s and so on.

What we want is for America to keep its eyes on the real story, the one those glorious legions of peaceful protestors, armed only with the First Amendment, have been trying to point us to:

We’ve got a ton of work to do.

And it’s about a whole hell of a lot more than simply justice for George Floyd, as vital as that first step is. We’ve got to stare long and honestly at the ugliness inside our nation’s history, then unwind a slew of racist practices embedded in our laws, our policing, our justice system, our social and economic policies, our souls.

It may take decades, generations to finish the work. But as the Jewish Talmud teaches (paraphrasing here): Knowing that we might not see the end of the work does not excuse us from beginning it.

We have to work simultaneously on ourselves and on our society. I’ve read a fair bit of American history and have some grasp of racism’s central role in that narrative, but my swirling emotions of the last few weeks have shown me just how much more work I have to do. I’m still some way away from full clarity about my privilege and what it demands of me in this moment if I’m to be a useful citizen of these United States.

Here’s the main thing: We will be required not only to work on ourselves and to vote consistently for justice, but to pay up.

It’s going to take tax dollars, whole piles of them. And the only place they can be found is from me and my fellow residents of the upper quintiles of the income scale. Not just the billionaires; all of us in the comfortable middle class.

If you pledge allegiance to the flag, but shirk this one, you’re a hypocrite. The city on a hill does not build itself.

To anyone who’s gearing up a tired right-wing rant about all taxation being tyranny and theft, I say: Spare me. You’ve had your day for the last four decades – and look where it’s gotten us. We’re going to try something different now.

Here, just as examples, are a few changes in law and policy that will be essential to redeeming (not avenging) the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice and so many grievously more:

• Redirect all the federal money formerly spent on shipping surplus war equipment to police departments into supporting proper training of officers, away from “warrior” mentality nonsense into the kind of smart community policing that kept Camden, the desperately poor city just across the Delaware River from Philly, so calm last week.

• Eliminate the clearly race-based differences in our laws on drug use and dealing, and the compounding differences in how those laws are enforced and prosecuted.

• End privately run prisons. They are an abomination and a stain on democracy. A just society cannot contract out the taking of someone’s liberty. (Someone close to me just spent two years incarcerated in a privately run state prison; you cannot imagine all the evil scams these places come up with to squeeze out more profit.)

• Spend federal tax dollars, heaps of them, to help states and counties hire – and pay competitively – many, many more public defenders. If we’re to have a system of justice, rather than one of random mass incarceration, we cannot tolerate courts that can’t get through the day without stampeding poorly represented clients into pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit.

• Enact stronger, more savvy bans of redlining by banks and insurance companies – then enforce those freaking laws.

• Begin to pay down, in some way, the reparations due for the lasting impacts of slavery, segregation – and structural biases that endure to this day.  “Forty acres and a mule” isn’t practical, but neither is doing nothing. This next bullet point might be a place to start …

• End – finally, please, once and for all – our broken systems of K-12 education that punish those unlucky enough to be born in some ZIP codes while ladling ever more advantages onto those fortunate enough to be born in others. I don’t want to take anything away from the fortunate suburban kids (hey, my own two fit the description). I want us to dig deep to make sure kids born a couple of miles north or west of where I live now get an equal crack at the indispensable public good called education.

Let me end with one more bit of Jewish wisdom: Tikkun olam – let us repair our world.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.