by Rambler63 » July 19th, 2017, 7:44 pm
It's either disdain for urban areas (my guess), jealousy, or hatred of Catholics.
Politically, there has never been a bigger disparity in voting between urban areas and rural areas. In 2009, many Republicans openly rooted for Chicago to lose their Olympic bid because Obama happened to be from there, and many people wanted a setback for the Democratic President more than they cared about the United States having an Olympics. Because Obama was from Chicago, there was a concerted, relentless line of suggestion on political talk radio about Chicago's crime rate ("Why hasn't Obama done anything about crime in Chicago??!??!") and "Chicago" became political shorthand for liberal Democrats and their terrible way of doing things.
As it turns out, many cities-- including Mike Pence's most recent home town, Indianapolis, and the MVC headquarters of St. Louis-- have much worse crime rates and violence per capita than Chicago does. Where is the outrage for Pence? Hatred of Butler? Rejection of SLU as an MVC add?
Within the state of Illinois, Chicago is also often blamed politically for everything wrong. When I first moved to Normal in 2007, there were a lot of letters to the editor in the Pantagraph about separating Chicago, or everything north of I-80, from the rest of Illinois. Many people correctly responded that it would instantly make downstate Illinois into a slightly larger, flattter, uglier West Virginia.
Look, I'm the first to admit that Loyola has some problems. We need to raise our athletic budget and especially our men's baksetball budget. We need to get more aggressive and professional about marketing. We need to figure out how to monitize and memorialize our men's basketball national championship and expand the winning attitude and philosophy of our two consecutive men's volleyball national championships (2014, 2015) and our nationally-ranked men's soccer team from last year.
But the knee-jerk hatred for Loyola doesn't make any sense at all, unless you examine it in the political sense. Loyola was THE BEST ADD POSSIBLE when Creighton left, and only a few years later, Loyola is one of the best hopes for keeping the Missouri Valley Conference a vital and relevant conference.
And lastly, I invite all the folks who REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate Loyola to have a couple of drinks at sunset during the summer at a sidewalk cafe just south of campus-- with a breeze blowing off the lake, the El going past with office workers headed home, the smell of Chicago pizza in the air, and some beautiful tannned women reading their email while walking their dogs. If you still hate us then, the real problem is in the mirror.
