Quote:
Originally Posted by ladygreek
Interesting, because after being born and raised in the Lou, I wouldn't call it midwest (we considered ourselves borderline south,) a large urban city, nor liberal (racism is and has always benn rampant.) It always seems to be two steps behing the rest of the country.
As for Southern Illinois, when I attended SIUC in the 60s-70s, Carbondale had some of the poorest areas I had ever seen--including all the homes in the "regular" neighborhoods still having out-houses. Having been there recently, the non-poor consists of the faculty and admin of SIUC, but the town itself is still behind the times. The same with Central IL, because of the U of I. In other words those areas only have a modicum of progressiveness because of the universities that exist there. The locals/natives are a totally different story.
Oh and folx I know in OH--mainly Cleveland do consider themselves to be midwest--as does Delta, which has them in our Midwest region. BTW, MO is not in our midwest region--IL yes, but not MO. The MS River is the divider.
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Only went to school in STL but yeah, it is a weird mix of southern with Midwestern, however it votes blue which is apparently what we're talking about. Southern Illinois has some really poor areas, however Central IL is not at all the same. Champaign-Urbana is a college city, but the rest of Central IL are primarily industrial. I've never seen an outhouse in Decatur or Springfield and the small towns around there generally have good school districts even though they're not pulling in the same tax revenues as the cities.
Yes there's poverty everywhere, but being conservative in the Midwest doesn't mean you're poor or uneducated which seemed to be what the previous poster was saying. Most of Illinois is conservative and most of it is not poor nor poorly educated.
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