Respected businessman A. Bruce Crawley proudly displays his proclamation surrounded by Philadelphia City Councilmembers. Photo credit: Philadelphia City Council Office of Communications
Businessman and entrepreneur A. Bruce Crawley was recently honored with a resolution from City Council in recognition for his decades of leadership and invaluable contributions to the business, hospitality, and political communities in Philadelphia.
Crawley, the founder of Millennium 3 Management, the African American Chamber of Commerce, and a founding member of Visit Philadelphia, addressed Council with heartfelt thanks and his thoughts for the city’s future.
“I want to begin my brief remarks today, by extending my most sincere appreciation to each of the members of this city’s most important legislative body,” Crawley said. “You directly represent the interests of each of the city of Philadelphia’s 1.5 million residents, and each of its neighborhoods. You introduce and pass the laws that govern this great city; it is YOU, in City Council, who are responsible for approving the mayor’s annual budget, which amounted to $6.4 billion, this year.
So, let me say, as a native of my beloved North Central Philadelphia, and as a lifelong resident of this city, that I am extremely humbled that you, somehow, made time in your demanding schedule to pass a resolution thanking me for my contributions to the Philadelphia’s political, business and hospitality communities over most of those years.
Your resolution covered my leadership roles in the business, hospitality and political communities but, quite frankly, I hope you don’t mind if I choose not to speak about any of that today.
Instead, I would rather talk about the responsibilities we all must share, in what our predecessors often described as “living through interesting times.”
When I was a young man, I thought, like many of us, that the people who were saying they “hoped you would live in interesting times,” were wishing that the people to whom they were speaking would actually ENJOY what life would bring their way in the future.
In fact, it was completely the opposite. That statement was actually meant as a dismissive CURSE, and in using the word “interesting,” they meant times that would be filled with challenges, great difficulty, turmoil, wars and strife.
I bring that up to remind us all that we are, indeed, ourselves, living in “interesting times.” And this has been by design.
I was fortunate to have seen a wonderful movie, years ago, called “WATTSTAX.” It was about a popular music company in the South, and it used residents in those communities to define each musical genre that the company produced — rock and roll, jazz, etc.
When it came to the part when the movie wanted to define what the musical genre called “the Blues” was about, the camera focused tightly on a group of older Black men, who were clearly economically challenged. At that point, one of those men looked directly into the camera and said, “I have been down so long that getting up don’t even cross my mind.”
That quote has stayed with me for my entire life, because it was a clear political statement.
He absolutely recognized that those in power had successfully worked, over all his years on earth, to deprive him of having fair social and economic opportunity. That had gone on for so long that he had become resigned to the belief he and his family were powerless to improve their circumstances, so he just stopped thinking about ways that would make things better for his family.
At the great risk of sounding too political in these bi-partisan, stately government chambers, I feel obligated, nevertheless, to say, since you invited me today, to say that in my opinion, the current federal administration has been working overtime, since January of this year, to instill that kind of fear and hopelessness into the vast majority of Americans who happen not to be billionaires, or otherwise extremely wealthy.
All the buttons are being pushed: Every constitutional right is being challenged or ignored, outright. Access to economic, social and healthcare opportunity is being erased with the stroke of a pen. Immigration — which brought the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, and hordes of slave ships to North America — has now been cast as an abominable evil, and those who can’t prove that their ancestors were not born in this country are no longer welcome, but are being captured on the streets of the United States and mass-deported to maximum-security prisons in places named El Salvador, Guantanamo, Sudan and Rwanda.
That’s not, in any way, normal.
People are suffering unnecessarily, and people are dying as result of these, petty, racist and class-based actions.
You have been kind enough to recognize me and others, over the past years, for making contributions to society at civic and community levels, yet there seems to be precious little interest in further encouraging, beyond these proclamations, the kind of community and grassroots involvement that might bring solutions to these larger, insidious and anti-American policies that we’re seeing online and on virtually all of our traditional media outlets, every day.
With that, I want to sincerely thank you for today’s recognition, but I also want to strongly encourage each of you to do all in your great power to help to restore fairness, equity and opportunity to this country that used to be known as “the land of opportunity.”
Please let me know if I can help!
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