Cities are on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic — not the cause of it.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a moment that reveals our character. A moment where people will remember who was there for them and who made it worse. It is a moment that will show what we value — and even more importantly, who we value.

So, like many revelatory moments, it’s perhaps unsurprising that it also magnifies the best and worst attitudes in the debates over who our cities belong to; who they’re “for”. The familiar choruses of people who show up in droves to block new housing, cut people off from access to jobs and resources through blocking transit, argue against any attempts to improve the lives of workers, and insist on simultaneous world-class services only for them at record low tax rates only for them, are back again to participate in magical thinking.

They believe that density, diversity, and our cities are single-handedly the reason for our national health crisis — not catastrophic federal negligence, our long-failing health care system, and a lack of universal policies like sick leave, family leave, and other frontline worker protections that can collectively form our best defense against breakdowns of public health. They willfully disregard that some of the biggest, densest cities in the world in places like Singapore and Japan have not only defeated COVID-19, but did so through massively coordinated public health efforts that succeeded in part because of the proximity of people to necessary services.

Their commentary in this moment reveals them — and so, too, does the response of our cities reveal us.

Cities are not the cause of COVID-19, but on the frontlines of response efforts getting us through it. Cities are working around the clock with counties for more homeless beds, more and safer services in spite of rapidly dwindling budgets, more protections for frontline workers and more ways to safely get around on newly empty streets. Cities are outpacing the White House for response efforts in much of America.

I’m glad to say in my home state of Minnesota, our Governor Walz, Lt. Governor Flanagan and their administration are setting a public leadership standard that is so far yielding hard results. My own city of Saint Paul has a COVID help hotline in multiple languages, so residents can get help in Oromo, Somali, Karen, Spanish, and Hmong in addition to English. My Saint Paul is running school bus routes that bring socially distanced meal drop-offs to families who depend on St. Paul Public Schools for lunch and breakfast every day. My Saint Paul is broadcasting story hour through the public library to thousands of families at home without stable childcare. My Saint Paul is building out a cash assistance program for some of our neediest families and businesses that may ultimately be faster and more compassionate than Washington, thanks to the vision and leadership of Mayor Melvin Carter and hundreds of hardworking public employees and community partners.

The people of my Saint Paul are bringing music to empty street corners and meals to elderly people living alone in fear. That’s because we believe in what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the beloved community — a society based on abundance and justice, not scarcity and scorn for our fellow human. The old way of “getting what’s yours” at the expense of everyone else has failed — that’s how we got here. Now more than ever, we need the principles and power of collectivist urbanism nationwide.

At the end of the day, here’s what our response to COVID-19 will tell us: you either care about people of color, young people, old people, poor people, sick people, transit-dependent people, undocumented people, queer people and people who can’t afford a home — or you don’t. You either believe our cities and communities are for all of us, or you openly and proudly hope the experiment to make it that way fails, because you stand for the opposite. Candidates, columnists, and anyone else right now crowing against urbanism, science, human decency and good governance are telling us what they stand for. Let it be known in this moment, in our cities and across our country, what we stand for.

We are fighting for a rent and mortgage suspension, moratorium on evictions, healthcare for all, massive transit and green infrastructure funding to aid economic recovery, compassionate homelessness response, labor rights for those taking care of us, bailouts for the people whether or not you have papers, and so much more, because we don’t just believe in the idea of cities. We believe in the people of them, and in our non-negotiable right to live with what we need, where we are, close to those we love.

At the end of this pandemic, it will take every last one of us to rebuild what we’ve lost together, and a radical re-imagining of our society as we knew it. I genuinely hope for and invite everyone’s participation to that tremendous effort. If you don’t want to be part of the “common human good” project, though, just remember: it’s always completely free to just say nothing at all.

We’ll fight for you anyway.

Mitra Jalali is a St. Paul City Councilmember.