Phil Goldsmith has held senior positions in a broad spectrum of fields including law, journalism, business and government. Most recently he was managing director of the City of Philadelphia.
He is now a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, writing every other Wednesday and is a principal in GoldsmithKahn Associates, a public issues management consulting firm.
My bi-weekly (or is it bi-monthly?) column in today's Daily News is the third of six columns that I have written about the rising violence in our city. I didn't want to write about violence this time. In fact, I had intended to write about an entirely different subject. But when I saw that the death toll on Philadelphia's streets increased by nine over this past weekend, my intended topic seemed trivial in comparisan.
I'm getting tired of all the violence--here in Philadelphia and there in the Middle East. I don't understand how people can hate people (or hate themselves) so much that they resort to such extreme measures. And I particularly don't understand the belief that violence deters violence. From my vantage point, violence seenms to beget violence.
I don't believe there is a magic bullet (pun intended) to end the violence. It will take an array of actions, big and small. That is frustrating but not nearly as frustrating, as I write in my column today, as seeing people in power not working more closely together to fashion a framework of action.
I am trying to take comfort in something William James once wrote:
"I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like capillary oozing of water, yet which, If you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride."
