Mark Alan Hughes is back and he wants to remind you just how bad things are around here. He makes his point very clearly and simply:
Our biggest problems ARE NOT FIXABLE.
And you know what, he's right. He's so right that before I read past that point I wasn't even considering what his thought of as "our biggest problems" as our biggest problems.
Before you rip me to shreds for not caring about poor people, let me explain. Poverty, and the conditions described by Hughes, are a problem and in a sense they are our problem if you define the "us" in "our" as all of humankind, or at least, citizens of the richest nation that the world has ever known. It's up to all of us as humans to care about our fellow man and it's up to those of us who are lucky enough to have been into a life in this nation, in which we're not going to bed hungry and cold, and we have a roof over our heads.
However, if "our" means the voters and residents of Philadelphia, then no, poverty is not our problem. So as Hughes writes about our biggest problem in Philadelphia being unfixable, I immediately thought that he much be talking about things like the shaky long-term prospects of the city's finances or its crumbling infrastructure. But those problems are fixable "if," as Hughes puts it, "we just proceed in the right way: not too fast, not too slow, with just the right expectations for our next mayor."
And then he's right, when the time comes that our city government is doing the best job it possibly can, when we as Philadelphians have nothing more to complain about in the delivery of city services or what we're getting for our wage, business and property taxes, then we as Americans can focus our attention on those big problems.
Good to have you back, MAH.