town and country

I read that last month in the newspaper, surprised to see it still kicking around.  When I first moved down to Champaign, I had kind of a condescending attitude towards Champaign-Urbana.  Kind of a cute little town, little houses, set apart a bit, each one of them different, how unlike Chicago's bungalows chock a block and looking pretty much alike, and so small, in two hours of walking you would be in a cornfield.  Since I lived in a dorm on campus I didn't have much interaction with the citizen's of the town, but as I became a dropout and lived off campus about half my friends were locals,  Nice enough people, well they were my beer drinking buddies and what's not to like about a beer drinking buddy?

As I began to identify with Champaign I became a bit estranged from Chicago,  It was so crowded and noisy, and people were rude and quick spoken, and it seemed dangerous, all those murders in the pages of the Sun-Times.  When I had to return here in 1987 because I was dead broke one of my thoughts was will I ever get out of here alive.

Apparently not.  I love living here now right smack downtown in the heart of the hurly burly  If only there weren't so many sirens, I hasten to add that they are mostly ambulances and fire engines, hardly any police sirens. 

There are always movements in states where one side wants to split off, West Virginia comes to mind.  When I was in Champaign there was a movement in western Illinois to secede, they thought they weren't getting their fair share of the spoils,  If the rest of Illinois seceded from Chicago and the near suburbs there would soon be trouble between the exurbs and central and southern, and likely western Illinois. 

Anymore it's more of an urban rural thing, the rurals think the urbans are a bunch of crooked slickers and the urbans think the rurals are slow-thinking hicks,  And it's not too hard to see some racism in it too,  There is some talk of the cities bleeding the rural areas of dough but in almost all cases the cities are putting more into the pot and taking less out than the rural areas. 

The current schism in politics plays into it too, and Trump just makes the schism worse, but there is nothing good to come of the further Balkanization of the country and wiser heads see that and nothing is to come of those crackpots and their silly idea.