When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker—Philadelphia’s 100th mayor and the first woman ever to hold that office—was inaugurated in January 2024, she promised a greener and safer Philadelphia.

The 51-year-old moderate Democrat and former school teacher, who said she is not in alignment with the city’s progressive radical elite, reminded voters during her campaign that she was never in favor of defunding the police during the St. George Floyd riots in 2020.

In a campaign promise, she vowed a crackdown on crime and the reinstitution of stop-and-frisk, putting her at odds with D.A. Larry Krasner.

Parker’s inaugural address included a commitment to clean up the city’s Kensington area, known throughout the world as “The Walmart of Heroin” (the name given to the area by The New York Times in 2018).

The situation in drug-addled Kensington is far worse now than it was in 2018, especially since a new drug, “tranq,” causes addicts to fall into a trance and mimic zombie-like behavior. In the 1950s, Kensington was a showplace of working-class stability with Quaker lace and Stetson hat shops all along Kensington Avenue. Today, it is a city-within-a-city that most Philadelphians try to avoid – and cleaning it up may be an impossible dream. The area has been allowed to exist as a drug emporium for too many years to just instantly sweep it away like a bucket-list project.

The new mayor also plans to end the work-at-home option for city employees. Parker said that such a move is necessary in order to restore the city to its pre-COVID lockdown state when it had a bustling downtown area with few office vacancies, and scores of commuters frequenting restaurants and shops.

Philadelphia in 2020 might be described as the polar opposite of what life was like in Governor Ron DeSantis’ Florida — that is to say, the city was almost Stalinist in its exercise of cautious COVID protocols, such as the early recommendation that came from City Hall that Philadelphians should “report” households where gatherings of more than 5 or 6 people were taking place.

On that first 2020 “COVID” Easter, I attended a dinner party at the home of a friend with 15 non-mask wearing guests who toasted the holiday as passersby on the sidewalk peered into the windows at us, some looking as if contemplating filing a report. Although we were not reported, it was astonishing to see Orwellian activity like this taking place in a city that always prided itself on its rustic individualism.

Millennial female leftist Democrats seemed to be the most gung-ho proponents of mask-wearing at that time.

One strident mask warrior even scolded me publicly for walking outdoors without a mask. This was the same year when events throughout the city were cancelled—author readings, lectures, plays, art exhibits, play openings—and when luxury apartment houses and condos forbade their high-paying tenants from having any visitors, essentially treating them like prisoners.

The lockdown also ushered in the work-at-home phenomenon. While that option was a growing trend before the pandemic, it was awarded primarily to worthy employees who had been with a company for some time, not new hires, and certainly not everybody.

Yet suddenly everybody was working at home. This caused a ripple effect throughout the city: empty streets and empty subway and regional rail trains, which in turn led to cutbacks and reduced scheduling.

The lockdown’s disastrous psychological effects also created a new “type” of person. Many—especially in church and synagogue communities—replaced God with Dr. Fauci’s encyclicals, canceling all interactions with the rest of humanity, leaving their homes only to food shop but eschewing all other outside activities like seeing family members.

People I’d formerly thought of as being “full of life and vigor” were now hiding at home in their basement (like Biden during the 2020 campaign), turning down offers of Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner with their families and refusing to attend weddings and funerals.

It had become the woke, politically-correct thing to do: turn down invitations, even one last chance to see a dying grandmother or uncle. Wearing a mask outdoors as often as you could became a badge of honor, even if you were on a country road miles from anyone else.

Working-at-home got the universal Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval: holing up in a room and maybe buying a dog for company (which is what many lockdown addicts did during COVID in lieu of seeing family and friends).

In retrospect—yet it’s still happening today–it seemed that the double and triple vaccinated people were the only ones getting sick or getting COVID for the fourth or fifth time, while the rugged and dirty homeless who panhandled the streets day in and day out never seemed to get sick, their immune system bolstered by their interaction with life and other people.

When Mayor Parker announced her plan to end the at-home option for city workers, the lockdown leftists squealed like pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Some said that COVID was still a threat. Indeed, these are the same people The UK Telegraph had in mind when it reminded readers, “We must resist the siren calls of the mask fanatics.” It’s the same people that The Federalist referred to in its 2020 article “Mask Fanatics Have officially Abandoned Science to Control Your Life.” It’s the same people that Vox surveyed in its 2021 piece, declaring: “Most Americans like remote work—but Democrats like it more.”

This is especially true with the rise of the single woke young Democrat female like the millennial who scolded me for not wearing a mask in public.

Then there was a woke New Yorker article in 2022, “The Case for Wearing Masks Forever,” which feeds into what the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) stated in 2022: that although the Golden Age of remote work appears to be ending, there’s still “The Great Resistance.”

Independence Blue Cross and Comcast, two of Philadelphia’s largest employers, have already mandated that employees return to the office.

This has helped the anti-progressive Democrat mayor (conservatives in Philadelphia must resort to Democrats since there are no Republicans of power here), to crank up the ante and demand that all city employees get out of their basements and work in-office.

Some of the pushback Parker has received is best expressed in a comment one employer made to The Philadelphia Inquirer: “It’s like pulling teeth to get them to come back to work.”

Yet employees of the company didn’t cite COVID as the reason they wanted to work at home (forever). Instead, they mentioned vagrancy, crime and quality-of-life issues—issues that were exacerbated by the long lockdown they wish to prolong.

The flight of office workers from downtown has also had an eerie effect on the area around City Hall, where office buildings are the most stressed (vacancies), giving the heart of the city a permanent 2020 ghost-like flavor.

Prior to 2020, there were 21,000 office workers around City Hall. That number today barely reaches 13,000 — with far fewer workers on-site two days a week, Mondays and Fridays. Pedestrian foot traffic around City Hall in 2024 is still way below 2019 levels.

Parker has brought some common sense into this impossibly leftist city, and for this she deserves some credit — though it’s impossible to know if her independence in these matters will last.

Lockdowns, as The Federalist noted, were dubbed an “unproven” hypothesis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And even the World Health Organization called forced isolation and quarantine “ineffective and impractical.”