Only 364 more days to Ill. Bicentennial, so I’m contemplating a journey

I know it’s a month early to be making New Year’s resolutions, but the fact that Illinois is now officially beginning the process of celebrating our state’s 200 years of existence makes me want to make one.

I hope to see (finally) the red dots at Ill. extremus

In my case, I want to make trips sometime during 2018 to Galena and Cairo.

NOW I’M SURE many who are reading this are wondering how rattled is my brain. What could possibly make me think those small cities at the far northwest and southernmost tips of Illinois are worth seeing?

It’s just that in my case, I have spent years making a joke out of the fact that I have never actually seen either of those Illinois municipalities. I’m a Chicago native who was educated in Bloomington and also lived and worked in Springfield.

And in my duties as a reporter-type person, I have visited much of the state of Illinois – which is in its own way a unique place.

Now for those who think the downstate (as in “not Chicago-area”) portions of Illinois are too radically different from us to take seriously, I’d say get real.

This flag will fly across Illinois

CHICAGOANS HAVE MORE in common with places like Peoria or Rockford or East St. Louis than we do overly-haughty Noo Yawkers who forget that Staten Island is more true to their image than Manhattan, or snooty Bostonians who think they have a monopoly on our American history (although I confess I enjoyed Boston the one time I visited it).

But the joke is that Galena and Cairo are the only two places of significance across Illinois that I’ve never had an excuse to be in – although I was close to Cairo on occasions when I had to visit the state corrections facility in Tamms (about 12 miles to the north of Illinois’ southern tip).

From the sesquicentennial of '68

I feel like I ought to complete the journey and say I’ve seen all of my home state. Life doesn’t go on forever.

And in a year when we’re supposed to be highlighting our state’s history, I can’t envision a better time to do so.

I KNOW SOME people will joke that Galena (about 3,200 population) is nothing but a batch of antiques shops, although it has a prime location near the Mississippi River (and is the one-time home of a future U.S. president Ulysses Grant, just like the Hyde Park neighborhood is for Barack Obama) and probably is something close to the vision of Illinois that the state’s founders had back on Dec. 3, 1818 – the date upon which Illinois officially became a state in its own right within the United States. Chicago’s post-Fire development is something no one ever would have dreamed of).

While I also know from experience whenever I’ve told Southern Illinois natives I’d like to see Cairo, they look at me like I’m nuts.

Largely because Cairo is the city they have fled out of their own racial hang-ups. Cairo, the city right at the point where the Ohio River converges with the Mississippi River to flow southward to New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico. A point I truly would be curious to see, even though I’m sure it will forevermore make me wonder why Cairo’s prime spot never developed into a major Midwestern city.

Which one should I check out first?

Cairo is a place that at its peak a century ago had a 20,000 population with black people living in segregated communities nearby. But it is now a city of about 2,600 people with an overwhelming majority of them being African-American.

NOT THAT I’M bad-mouthing Southern Illinois – heck, there are Chicago neighborhoods (particularly on the South Side) that used to be lily-white but where “white flight” was so thorough that the locals now have no clue white people ever existed there.

So these are thoughts I’m having as I contemplate Illinois’ intent to lead up to the actual state Bicentennial date next December. Those celebrations are kicking off with ceremonies Monday to be held at McCormick Place and at municipal buildings across the state.

Are these suggested sites?

There will be a noon-hour flag raising ceremony across Illinois where a specially-designed Bicentennial flag will take place. Let’s hope that this ceremony, and the assorted proclamations that municipalities have been approving in acknowledgement, aren’t the extent to which most people pay tribute.

For as one proclamation read, “Illinois Bicentennial is a once-in-a-lifetime invitation to fall in love with Illinois all over again, and together we can inspire pride in Illinois and show the world what makes this state so great.”

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Will we react in time to save Cairo?

Will a modern-day image of this old postcard depicting Cairo, Ill. and its position along the rivers be nothing but a sea of light blue?

I have never set foot in Cairo, Ill. That town at the far southern tip of the state where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers converge and where one literally is seven miles closer to Jackson, Miss., than they are to Chicago.

And now, I’m wondering if I’m never going to get the chance.

WILL IT TURN out that the time I was in Tamms, Ill., (about 12 miles to the north of Cairo), I will be able to claim I was in what will become the far southern tip of Illinois?

The aging southern city that resembles a ghost town in many parts is getting hit with heavy rains that are causing the two rivers that are the sole justification for its location to rise higher and higher.

The Ohio River at Cairo reached record-high levels on Sunday, and officials say it will continue to rise. Which has people thinking it is just a matter of time before the levees will give way and the rivers will wash away the city of some 2,800 people.

That has the Army Corps of Engineers thinking that the solution to the problem is to blow a hole in the levees that protect the Missouri side of the river from flooding. By letting farmland along the river overflow with water, they think it would ease pressure enough on the Cairo levees so that they will hold – and Cairo will continue to exist.

THE PROBLEM IS Missouri political people, who are determined to drag this issue out in the courts – even though the federal district and appeals courts have both upheld the desires of the Army Corps of Engineers as being justified and, quite possibly, the best way to cope with an ugly situation.

Missouri officials on Sunday tried unsuccessfully to get the Supreme Court of the United States to take the case under advisement, which meant that the Illinois attorney general’s office was busy this weekend trying to fight off the legal stalling tactics so that preventative action can occur.

There are those who are trying to portray this as selfishness by Missouri, trying to protect farmland instead of a city with actual people – even though Cairo officials this weekend gave the evacuation order and are trying to get everybody out of the area so as to reduce the potential for casualties should the river overflow.

I’m not quite sure I see it that simple.

BUT THIS COULD be a case where Cairo’s history, particularly from the late 1960s when racial tensions related to the demise of segregation as an acceptable policy for life in this society, is continuing to linger in its own weird way.

The historic fact is that when it became apparent that the old ways were gone and that the white and black populations of Cairo were going to mix (actually, Cairo proper was white, while black people were expected to stay in the unincorporated community of Future City located just up U.S. Route 51), many of the white people fled the area.

That is what gives us a modern-day Cairo that is overwhelmingly African-American, and ONLY 2,831 people in size. I’m sure there are many people who are fighting the Army Corps of Engineers’ desires who simply think that the people who remain in Cairo just don’t matter.

Or that we’re doing them a major favor by encouraging them to leave and letting the river overflow into Illinois – thereby forevermore eliminating the city that once was supposed to be a major shipping port in the United States because of its location on the two major rivers.

THE NATION'S HIGH court wound up deciding not to hear the case, letting the lower court rulings remain in place and allowing this to become an issue to be considered by the Army Corps of Engineers. Let's only hope the legal nonsense ended in time – because we really don’t know how much time there is left.

Various reports coming out of Cairo indicate signs that water is somehow seeping underneath the levee, which could weaken the structure and cause it to collapse. It is totally possible that the courts could make the proper rulings to give the Army Corps of Engineers the authority to decide for themselves how to fix this mess (which is one of their reasons for existence), only to have the levee collapse just before the court ruling is made public.

Will our political people get their act together in time to fix the disaster-in-the-making at Cairo? If they don’t, I’d think it is the kind of mess that is worthy of bringing down someone’s political career – and not just Missouri House Speaker Steve Tilley, R-Perryville, for bluntly saying that Missouri farmland was worth more than Cairo people.

Because someday I’d like to be able to go down to that part of Illinois (about the only part of the state I haven’t been to) and see where the rivers come together. I’d rather be surrounded by people when I do so, and NOT the ghost town-like remains of the city that so many of us became confused about when pronouncing.

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