“It’s not your standard bus tour. For three hours, passengers on the Drug War Reality Tour ride through North Philadelphia’s neighborhood of Kensington, seldom disembarking to see the sights on this trail of smuggling and addiction.

A short ride from Philadelphia’s Center City, the neighborhood has come to be synonymous with extreme poverty, drugs, the sex trade, and violence in the minds of many in the city.

Local textile jobs have long since gone to cheaper labor in the South and abroad. Boarded-up houses line the streets, lots stand vacant, and shops string razor wire along their rooftops to ward off burglars. Most of the businesses – liquor stores, pawnshops, check-cashing offices, and inexpensive Latin American or Chinese eateries – cater exclusively to the very poor.

But there’s another local economy in Kensington, though it’s an illegal one. The drug trade, says bus-tour organizer Arun Prabhakaran, is second only to public assistance as the major source of income in the neighborhood.”

CSMonitor, on Kensington, about the neighborhood and those fighting to change things.

I have a personal history here. It drove me to write this song. I wrote a letter to the CSMonitor, thanking them for the story. In it I told them that those who work to bring hope to such a dark place are fighting the good fight.

It’s something to consider for the local mayoral elections ahead. While I have issues with many Mayor Street initiatives, the Safe Streets program is helping to make Philadelphia a safer place. I think we are due for a party change for mayor. 50 years is long enough. But will Sam Katz keep this valuable, if expensive, program going? He mentions the scant evidence of a rise in arrests. But it’s not about arrests. It’s about kids being able to play on the streets. It’s about neighbors being able to linger on their front porches and talk to one another. It’s about being able to walk to school and fear your grades more then getting shot! That is the greatest achievement of the Safe Streets program. That’s no small feat. No small feat at all. It deserves recognition.

“Urbi et Orbi” – “(May there be) peace in other parts of the world, where forgotten wars and protracted hostilities are causing deaths and injuries amid silence and neglect on the part of considerable sectors of public opinion” Pope opens Easter Sunday mass with call to work tirelessly for peace. A message just as well for Kensington as for the Middle East.

May you have a happy, and reflective, Easter.

Nicole of “go fish” is organizing a get together of Philly bloggers April 12th.

I’ll be playing paint ball that day so I won’t be able to make it. I’m bound to get my ass kicked (I’m way out of shape and it’s my first time playing), but it will be lots of fun. So will that get together. An opportunity missed 🙁

This NYTimes story touches a nerve don’t it?

hillies fans seem reluctant to use the word hope, and who can blame them? If Yeats was right when he wrote “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart,” then it’s no wonder Philadelphia sports fans are so often accused of having hearts of stone.

Philly fans, in their collective heart of hearts, always expect to lose, for the simple reason that their teams have always lost. In their unshakeable pessimism, they create a kind of Jungian collective paralysis that seems to infect their heroes in key moments. Like Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd in the climactic scene of “Ghostbusters,” they bring to life the very image that they fear the most.

In this year’s N.F.C. championship game, the sight of the heavily favored Eagles looking like a deer caught in headlights against the Tampa Bay Bucs is only the latest manifestation of sports’ longest ongoing nightmare.

Hey, don’t get down folks. Who thought we could have made it this far earlier in the season? Last night the team beat itself. That’s what makes it so damn sad. One thing that gets me is how bad the press – everybody – called this game. No one predicted the outcome. Last year the Rams were the better team. Plain and simple. This time – nah – no way. The Bucs are gonna get stomped by the Raiders. It’s going to be ugly.

Great interview with Paul Vallas, chief of the Philadelphia school system, posted at CSMonitor.

“It’s not that the schools got bad,” argues Vallas. “It’s that things changed around them. We’re preparing children for the economy of the future in the schools of yesterday.”

Politicians and education policy planners simply haven’t kept up, he says.

“You’ve got pregnant teens, more kids in foster care, more latchkey kids, less support at home, kids being exposed to far more violent images than 25 to 30 years ago, and more ready access to firearms.”

Add to that a changing economy that in recent decades has lured many women and minorities out of the classroom and into better-paying jobs.

The result, Vallas says, is a need to invest time, effort, and creativity into rethinking the way schools operate and how they hire teachers.

He also believes firmly in character education as a means of compensating for less parental support at home.

I like the plan to eliminate Philly’s middle schools. He’s made me a believer.

Micheal Vick was as scary as people say, but the Eagles showed ’em. Experience and team that’s well… a team.. won out 🙂

This can be the start of a fun rivalry. The Falcons are going to be even more impressive down the line.

A scary, but fun night.

Philadelphia has a crime program that’s working…. cops visible and on the street.

Waiting until the last possible day, Gov. Schweiker signed legislation yesterday granting the suburbs more power than Philadelphia in running the Convention Center – and Mayor Street immediately responded by saying the city might no longer support financing half of the center’s much-coveted expansion.

Read the rest in in today’s Inquirer.

I tell ya, I find it ironic that the party whose central theme is the principal of local governance has been taking so much power away from it. The Convention Center and The Parking Authority. I’m making a bet your town has stories as well. City rights being transfered to the state. State rights being trumped by the federal government. All three threatened by corporate rights. Hamilton over Jefferson?

Just ironic.

Go Eagles!

It was good reading yesterday. Let me share some highlights…

First, the Inquirer covers how Street’s biggest contributors do very well at City Hall. That’s pretty much the way it’s always been and Street simply hasn’t faught the “way it is”. Actually, he seems to embrace it according to the article. Of course this has a whole lot to do with campaign finance and Philly isn’t following other cities’ attempts at reform.

Related to what I said yesterday about Philly slowly losing the control to govern itself, Tom Ferrick details just how well the state (Republican) takeover of the parking authority has gone.

In Silencing the demons Ralph Vigoda shares the story of Larry Boettcher. Suffering from schizophrenia, not taking his medication, he set himself up to be shot by the police.