The Question We'll Have to Answer

"Why do they call this the City of Brotherly Love"?

by Nathaniel Popkin

Editor's letter will return next week.

On Saturday night, as he rode his new green and white dirt bike down a wooded lane in Tacony Creek Park on Wyoming Avenue, Luis Navarro was shot and killed. He was 16 and lived on Pennhurst Street. On the dresser in his bedroom was a completed application for employment at Burlington Coat Factory.

His mother, who had purchased the bike, had a nervous breakdown and was taken to Einstein Hospital. Sitting on the stoop of the family's house, Luis' uncle Jose Gonzalez spoke with Daily News reporter Stephanie Farr. "Gonzalez," she wrote, "of Vineland, N.J., stared blankly with glazed eyes and posed a question. 'Why do they call this the City of Brotherly Love?' he asked."

His is the essential question. Do the founding ideals of our city, love and tolerance, matter on streets replete with injustice and ruled by the happy trigger? Or do they simply affect — every time there is a senseless act of violence — a numbing and repetitive melancholy? Are they a joke, or worse, a curse? Wouldn't we be more honest and better off disowning utopian ideals — those set forth by William Penn, Thomas Paine, the early German Quakers and all those since — and reconciling them with brutal reality? Take Penn down from City Hall, reinforce the structure and erect Andy Reid?

After all, Philadelphia has, over the centuries, lost its political and economic status; why not declare the experiment over and give up the ideals, too? And while we're at it, why not change the city's name? (Can you imagine the focus groups it would take to do so?) In the City of Lowered Expectations, the murder of a 16-year-old riding his bike in a city park would be devastating, a terrible loss, but what a relief not to have to call into question the moral foundations of the city. Why make a murder spree into the condemnation of the entire community?

Because we're not Detroit or St. Louis, Boston or New York. A burden or not, Philadelphia was invented to prove that human beings can live peacefully; to give up on that is to murder not only Luis Navarro but perhaps the most compelling element of the American project.

Listen to 19th-century journalist George Lippard, whose voice was resurrected by this newspaper in March, in the Quaker City Weekly Oct. 6, 1849: "It was a glorious day when the slaves of all nations met upon this soil and saw their rude homes, the palaces of the poor, rise through the trees of wilderness. A great day when William Penn, standing on the soil, beheld the exiles of every land encircle him and girdle his open heart with a band of brothers."

History, of course, is how we tell it. Lippard, who was faced with a period more violent than ours, was fond of this maxim. But Lippard kept Penn alive for a reason: The founder actually tried to live up to his ideals. If the utopia was to be written, it would have to be practiced, too. For this, early Philadelphia was perhaps the most cosmopolitan place on earth. Shall we try again?

I will argue that instead of shrugging our shoulders in the face of Jose Gonzalez, or worse, allowing his question to play into our collective loss, we make it the very foundation of our response to the sickening disparities of our city. The elevation of the ideas of love and tolerance make our city perplexingly unique — the longest-running utopian experiment, according City Paper contributor Steve Conn. That history is ours; what we do with it is a test of our ambition.

More immediately, we need some way to address the grief of that family on Pennhurst Street. Let's start by answering his uncle's question.

Nathaniel Popkin writes about contemporary city life, mythology and history.