by Nathaniel Popkin
July 5, 2007
While the Governor and a handful of state legislators are finally flexing some muscle on behalf of Septa, the mayor and our delegation in Washington
are still lying down and taking it. Another July Fourth has passed here in the Cradle of Liberty and still our national shrines are shrouded in
barricades, security apparatuses, and hired men with guns. Park Service employees (or are they, too, just private contractors?) were forced this
week, as every July Fourth since 9/11, to pull the bunting out of the closet to cover the ugly, inappropriate, and wholly undignifying barricades --
this despite the January 23rd decision to remove them. Isn't six and a half months long enough to pull a pick-up truck around to Fifth and Chestnut?
If you think so then you've missed the whole point of the Bush administration. Whether or not Bush and Cheney last another two years, their lasting
legacy is the securitized state with the mouths of Defense and Security men firmly suckling the public teat. It will take years -- not months -- to
pry open those glad and infantile lips (they're biting too, aren't they?).
But we on the side of reversing policies that have landed the United States number 96 on a
list of most peaceful countries in the world (just one
above Iran) are still afraid to fight for what we believe in. And so last week, as the bunting was being tied on to protect -- thinly deceive
-- the eyes of the tourists, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that Philadelphia had net-lost 8,000 residents in 2005 and therefore had fallen
decisively into sixth place among the nation's largest cities. Phoenix, with its thoroughly suburban density of 2,782 people per square mile
(Delaware County's is 2,990), has moved into fifth place.
There was no official reaction from Mayor Street, nor from Congressmen Brady or Fattah; nary a word from Arlen Specter. And yet there is no way
Philadelphia loses -- net -- 8,000 people a year. The building permit, immigration, schools, yes even Septa, hospital, social service, and home
sales data say just the opposite: the city has turned the tide on population loss. (Remember every city loses people -- New York as quickly as
Philadelphia -- so the key variable is rate of newcomers, i.e., immigrants and that rate is on the rise, pushed for example by the anti-immigrant
laws of Riverside, NJ.) Eight thousand a year is 80,000 a decade, a rate higher than the 1990s. In short: unbelievable.
Shouldn't we at least say something?
No, we ought to fight. A city that believes in itself so much that it will defend its honor to the rest of the nation would. Guess what? A whole
handful of cities do. Boston, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Washington, DC have all challenged the Census Bureau's arithmetic and won -- tens of
thousands of residents -- in some cases reversing long-standing population declines.
If we wish to alter the contemporary narrative of Philadelphia -- languishing, suffocated by poor leadership, intractable social problems -- then
we'll have to start convincing ourselves otherwise first. It's clear Mayor Street and the others aren't convinced. Nor do they understand the power
of symbolic politic gestures. Leaders, tell us you believe! Make the case -- intervene, Christ, we're bigger and stronger than we think -- tear
down the bunting for our sake: Nutter, you get this, don't you?
–Nathaniel Popkin
nrpopkin@gmail.com
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