Political Wasteland

Hello there, I wanted to introduce myself as the newest member of the Illinoize community and provide some background of where I am coming from. I have decided that a good first post is one from my own blog Political Wasteland. I hope that I can provide a fresh voice from West-Central Illinois that everyone enjoys.

Why do I consider myself in a political wasteland??? I feel that way because there seems to be very little political activism in my area. Knox County has been decimated by job loss recently, but the community seems to be apathetic. Because of that, politicians have not been forced to act on the situation. I feel like there needs to be some organizational efforts to create a voice in this area. We are situated between the Quad Cities and Peoria and do very little to move out of their shadows.

Some of the districting hurts us as well. For example, most of Knox County is in the 17th Congressional district. This has to be one of the most gerrymandered in the country. It stretches from the QC to quincy, to Sprinfield, to Decatur. How can I feel like a representative knows my needs when he has to know the needs of people all across the state? Our State Senate district is compact, but unfortunately covers area in the opposite direction. We get the Peoria area in that district. So if I am interested in news for my congressional race I have to look to the QC media, and for state races I turn to the Peoria media. It’s quite unfortunate.

Perhaps it is merely a bad string of candidates that is causing all of this. There seems to be little reason to get excited about the statewide races like governor. Both candidates seem as dirty as possible and neither has really come out with anything to talk about. Our congressional race seems to be totally irrelevant even though it is an open seat going into this election. Similar to the governors race, neither candidate is really that exciting. Our State Senate and Representative races have drawn no attention, though in the Rep. case, that’s because there is no race. The one heated race in the county seems to be the Circuit Judge race. That will be interesting, but even it’s been quiet so far. Judge races are so much less interesting because they can’t talk about a lot of stuff.

There doesn’t seem to be any sort of online community in this area either. I don’t know if it’s the demographics of the area or something else, but there seems to be no technological push that I can find.

So it's for those reasons that I feel like I'm in a political wasteland. I really hope things change because it is hard to want to be involved when there’s nothing to be involved in.