It’s been a grim year for San Antonians, much less the world. The pandemic has cost an enormous number of lives, wreaked economic havoc, isolated families and loved ones, and dramatically shifted how we work and live. While the arrival of vaccines offers us hope for change in the coming months, the devastation from the public health and social dislocations of the coronavirus are likely to linger far beyond, perhaps for years. Yet, even as our political and civic leaders appear to have only recently discovered that there are real problems of poverty and underemployment in San Antonio problems that a pandemic made obvious in miles-long lines for the Food Bank’s offerings there are some eternal verities about the city. There are a whole set of public issues, some real and some delusional, that seems to shape public discourse and government efforts year after year and decade after decade.