If those most affected by Philadelphia’s gun violence remain hopeful, who are we to give up?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the bad things happening in Philadelphia. No, not the imaginary ones Donald Trump alluded to near the end of the first 2020 presidential debate.

The Former Guy was, back then, as he continues to be today: A liar who lied when he claimed poll workers were having problems in Philly when in reality there were no polls in the city at the time.

I’m talking about the real bad things — food insecurity, housing insecurity, a broken school system, and a dysfunctional relationship between police and the community they serve. Those challenges are just some of the very bad things that Le’Yondo Dunn discussed in Trigger, a new film about the ripple effects of gun violence.

I happened to speak with Dunn a few weeks ago, after a group of teens were shot after a football scrimmage at Roxborough High School, leaving 14-year-old Nicolas Elizalde dead and four others injured. Dunn is now the top administrator for YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School, but in 2019, he was principal at Simon Gratz High School Mastery Charter in North Philadelphia when a shooting outside the football stadium left two teens injured. He lost nine students in one year to gun violence, three in just one month. There were somewhere north of 20 deaths during his tenure by the time he left the school earlier this year, he told me.

In addition to Dunn, I’ve long been in contact with a lot of the people featured in the documentary, a First Person Arts film presented by the city’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services.

So I thought I knew what to expect when I walked into a screening at the Parkway Central Branch of the Free Library this week.

“This city is in crisis,” gun violence survivor and community activist Rosalind “Roz” Pichardo said early in the hour-long film, giving voice to what so many of us have already been feeling.

“This is a curse on our city, on our people,” said Joel Seay, whose 18-year-old son, Jarrell, was killed on Easter in 2011.

“I can’t count how many times I’ve seen a Black man take his last breath,” said Ruqiyya Greer, a trauma nurse at Temple University Hospital.

Each speaker helped put a human face on those otherwise cold statistics that illustrate what too many in our city are up against: “We know that Black men have the lowest life expectancy at birth of any other group,” said John Rich, codirector for the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at Drexel University.

I was just as taken aback as Pichardo was in the film when someone off-camera asked her:

“Where does hope fit into all of this?”

Where, indeed?

Pichardo paused. Her eyes watered. Then she collected herself and answered: “You do lose it for a bit. And then when you find it, you find it with a vengeance.”

It was that fortitude, I realized, that we were witnessing on screen and in the room. Courage in the face of adversity. Hope against all the odds. Faith despite it all.

There near the back of the room at the screening was Charles Horton, paralyzed by a bullet when he was just a teenager, but dedicated to helping others navigate lives forever impacted by gun violence. And over there sat Bruce Nash, whose body is riddled with scars from being shot eight times in 2017, but who is committed to using his scars and his story as a road map to help others.

Joining them inside a packed, makeshift movie theater on a rainy Monday night were more than 100 people who knew what the real bad things happening in Philly are, but who are still nowhere near ready to give up on themselves or their city.

The emcee of the film screening, Chad Dion Lassiter, executive director of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, seemed to read my mind when he noted the juxtaposition of addressing some of the ugliest and most painful parts of living in our city while, through the fourth-floor windows of the library, a sweeping skyline view served as a reminder of its beauty and ability to be a source of solace.

That’s not to say that that view should distract us. The beautiful parts of our city can’t be sustained if the ugly is not addressed, and there are plenty of things that happened just this past week that should give us pause.

Our mayor regularly demonstrates that he is no longer up for the job — whether he’s publicly yearning for an end to his term or downplaying public safety concerns after a beloved local brand announced the closure of two of its stores because of crime.

Our police department is slower to respond to 911 calls in communities of color than in white neighborhoods, according to a recent report by City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart. She also found that the department doesn’t evaluate its crime-fighting strategies, which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to City Hall’s epic failure to adequately assess its antiviolence programs.

The police union was quick to dismiss Rhynhart’s report as a cheap shot from someone with mayoral aspirations. “According to this report, the Police Department does nothing right. I mean nothing,” John McNesby, president of the city’s chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said during a news conference.

I don’t know about “nothing,” but numbers don’t lie — and according to the report, from 2016 to 2020, Philly had the lowest homicide clearance rate of the 10 largest cities in the U.S.

And yet, there on the screen and in the audience, and all across Philadelphia, are people who would have every right to give up on our city, and haven’t.

So, who are any of us to throw in the towel?