Rural and urban Illinoisans live in starkly different worlds, and the former resent it, though they don't clearly understand why. There are textbook solutions, such as better education and higher parental expectations in rural Illinois. I wish I could be optimistic.
The differences are, sure, wealth, income, education and family cohesiveness, but more important, expectations and aspirations - with much less of all these in rural Illinois than in metro Chicago. Lawyers know where the wealth is - 87% of all Illinois lawyers practice in the six metropolitan Chicago counties, out of 102 counties in Illinois, according to the state Attorneys Registration and Disciplinary Commission. As for family units, pundits talk about the broken family unit as an urban problem. Yet, state public health agency reports show that nearly half of all births in 2020 in my rural home county of Stark were to unmarried (white) women; in nearby Peoria County, it was 54%.
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