Beneath the Puerto Rican flags that anchor Humboldt Park, I drive the route my dad drove every weekday for 30 years.
East past Washtenaw Avenue, where one of his basketball players shot and killed someone 29 years ago.
Past Western Avenue and the gym where my dad coached, the lot where he parked every day for work, where someone once filled his gas tank with sugar.
Past a hospital that takes care of underserved patients. Wards of the state fill the adolescent behavioral health unit at a sister hospital a few blocks away where children are locked for weeks or months in that unit as they wait for a home to call their own in this city we call ours.
After driving these streets enough times, I realize Chicago is the same now as then, always reinventing itself, carrying on its big shoulders — as we all do — the traumas, scars and triumphs of our pasts.
We tear down and rebuild — from Carl Sandburg’s hog butcher and freight handler to river reverser, commercial epicenter, freshwater capital.
But these days many people are leaving.
Let them go, I say, the ones who leave but could afford to stay.
To the rest of us: Stay.
Chicago remains what it was built to be: a center that draws people to work and live, agree and disagree, suffer and strive, to appreciate art and music and beauty, to feel something, question everything and imagine what’s possible.
It’s daring us to stick around and keep trying to be better.
Fierce as a mother or father who sacrifices everything familiar to start over in a foreign, bitterly cold place that reeks of butchered flesh, let us plant our roots and protect what we love.
My parents dedicated 50 years of their lives to educating the next generation here.
My grandfathers laid bricks and pounded nails here. My grandmothers answered telephones at the Sears Tower and stitched patterns to clothe the nation.
Their parents, not speaking a word of English, arrived on trains and boats to sell bananas and drive taxis and raise chickens and operate gates on the L.
Let’s stay in this city that gave us our history and make it new — again.
With vision and sacrifice, let’s make Chicago a paragon of anti-corruption and evolution, of elevated trains and elevated thinking. Let’s make it generous. Those who can afford it will take less and give more. We’ll curb our cars, put clean air in our lungs and hit the pavement.
We’ll be the City that Slows Down and Walks. The City of Racial and Socioeconomic Equity, of the Reformed Police Force and the Reclaimed Loop.
Girls and women will always have a choice here and the disenfranchised a voice.
Here, there will always be room at the table for another mouth to feed. We will be the City that Forgets No One and that No One Forgets. The City of the Fairest Wage, the Shortest Work Week, the Most Accessible Healthcare, Affordable Housing, Sustainable Living and Healthiest Hearts and Minds.
In this changing union, let Chicago be the center that holds.
The sun is warming. The lake looks as large as an ocean. The sky and politics are blue — blue that stands for taking care of ourselves and each other, babies and children, parents and grandparents, the underserved and heirs waiting for our help in that hospital ward.
People don’t hurt each other when they’re safe.
That’s what home is. It’s where we’re all taken care of.
If we pool our imaginations and resources, this City of Big Shoulders will stay strong enough to keep carrying us all.
Emily Dagostino, who works in communications for a health care system and lives in Oak Park, is one of the Sun-Times’ Chicago’s Next Voices guest columnists.
