Dear JB Pritzker —
Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this (and for all of you who shared it widely enough to reach his desk). I write to you today on behalf of a subject nearest and dearest to my heart: Little Egypt, Southern Illinois during historic floods. If you’re reading this and not JB, could you please share it widely until it finds him?
Also for those uninformed about the floods, please send some clicks to the local news desk I worked and the journalists there — my first job at 15 was as a night and sports DJ at Salem’s local radio station, WJBD where the wonderful Bruce Kropp still writes and broadcasts. All of the photos but the first, the map, and the plaque will come from WJBD and will redirect there.
As you do not know me, JB, I need to let you know that I write on desire and I live and serve in a nonprofit in NYC working with artists and creatives who need a leg-up in the world as they make what they feel called to make. But I was originally supported to do the work here — in part — by kind folk in Southern Illinois. Here I have collaborated with lovely progressives and democrats my entire career. Many of the big-name national politicians and judges with whom you have shared the stage at the Democratic National Convention and elsewhere went to high school with many of my neighbors here in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
Yet I grew up in an extremely conservative county which I still adore. Salem, Illinois, Marion County. That journey lead me to write the novel Bell Hammers, a novel about the oil and coal industry’s direct exploitation of my family and of my home region in tragic events like — spoilers in the next hyperlink for those who haven’t read Bell Hammers — Bloody Williamson.
Here’s the thing:
You and I know man folks in Little Egypt don’t like you. At all. “Pritzker Sucks” signs are common. And you and I know this is a region that has been exploited by big oil, big coal, big ag, big Pharma, big box retailers, and so many others for well over a century now. There’s literally a town in the southern half of the state with a little garden and a plaque reading:
This marker is placed here in honor of State Representative Mike Bost, who was the first Legislator in Springfield to help our town And our thanks to Senator Dave Luechtefeld for his efforts in securing state funding for Makanda projects This bridge spans and preserves the original arch culvert built of native rock by local stonemasons in the mid 1800’sa. The citizens of Makanda are grateful The preseverance of Mayor Bill Ross brought about these projecis.
OCT. 20: 1998
The first representative in Springfield, Illinois (the capital) to help our town. Dated 1998. I took a picture of it because this town is not the exception. They’re the rule in Southern Illinois dating back almost 150 years, which includes multiple Chicago corruption scandals.
I mean it’s a tiny bridge there in this town. The sheer minuscule scale of it is humbling and heartbreaking when compared with the infrastructure of Chicago (a city I also love as dearly as I love Salem). Having worked with people in NYC who were intimate with the Progressive Coders Network, Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and others — it’s almost impossible to think of a plaque like this cropping up around Burlington aimed directly at Bernie. Or at many faithful city council members here in NYC.
Yes, people of Southern Illinois hate you in part because they’re used to hating rich, powerful men who refuse to help them. They’re used to going it alone without aid from Springfield, Chicago, others. Even further afield: St. Louis, Indianapolis, Nashville.
But JB, I don’t hate you for the very simple reason that I try not to hate folks. You, like all people, seem to be a complicated person.
So here’s the other thing: they don’t have to hate you even inside the political environment we all find ourselves within. You, sir, have an opportunity here to do an amazing work.
In a region of 1.2 million people and 25,000 square miles — called, among other things for its struggles, a “book desert” because of the dearth of bookstores, which is why the downtown Belleville Books was planted in an old bank vault in September — we recently experienced historic flooding. It’s over twice the population of Boston, comparable to the Bronx: that’s the size of the constituency. You’ve seen the news on the floods, you know the disaster.
What you may not know about is how storm surges worked like a hurricane storm surge.
For example.
My brother for years has complained to anyone who would listen about the mayor’s refusal to fix the Salem spillway. My mother’s house is a block from the reservoir on the Northside. Beautiful, but it’s prone to flooding on mom’s side. The spillway hasn’t been upgraded. Down the spillway, there’s a creek called Town Creek. It’s the overflow and its never cleaned, always clogged with fallen trees and the like due to either incompetence or lack of funding or both:
14” of water breached the spillway in this storm creating a hurricane-like storm surge down the town creek. My brother thought his house was fine. He’s not in a flood zone and was never required by zoning to get flood insurance, so he didn’t. But it’s along this creek.
He looked out the window in the storm and lightning flashed. He saw a wall of water coming through the long back yard and heading towards the house. He ran down to the basement, which was a beautiful new bedroom he recently finished (I helped him a little on finishing his basement), grabbed a couple of items and was able to get their dog out.
That wall of water hit the garage door, apparently blew it in, and flooded everything in there with four feet of water. I didn’t just live through the Joplin tornado, NYC covid, and other disasters, JB. I worked Katrina, JB. I worked Galveston. I was here in NYC shortly after Sandy.
His pictures reminded me of hurricane-like flooding.
I’ve never seen something like it on a freshwater creek. I won’t list my brother’s losses here, that’s his business and he’s a proud man who — like most in the region — prefers to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. Suffice to say most of his more precious possessions were in the basement in his bedroom. This includes most of the heirlooms from our father who just died of COVID at 65, from both our grandpas who just died, as well as from our grandmother whose father, as I said in both Bell Hammers and the piece that sold to the New Haven Review (Yale’s Institute Library), built a grandfather clock “from the benches of pews from Young’s Chapel where they’d been married.” That grandfather clock was destroyed. So were all of grandpa Remmy’s toys.
And yet.
You and I, if we’re both honest, know how large systems can hurt small folks, how they can work against small folks. And you and I, if we’re both honest, know too that infrastructure and aid can help for generations, JB.
I think you and I also agree that good, competent governing can be a kind of ascetic practice where we choose to experience political, financial, or other pain on behalf of the wounded, the besieged, those experiencing disaster. A kind of mortification of ourselves personally for the sake of the poor.
Jesus once went to a rich young ruler, who had a truly good and beautiful personal piety but who had made his great wealth inside broken systems, and told him to sell everything he had and give to the poor. Personal culpability extends to the systems that enrich us. If you wanted, you could divest a third of your wealth and establish — as in Alaska, as I challenged Zuckerberg — to create a sovereign wealth fund for Southern Illinois that could be invested in the globaleconomy to pay out permanent dividends to its citizens for generations into the future.
While you’re considering that, you could also legislate and demand a groundswell of emergency help for those hit by flooding and who very quickly will experience serious mold issues — individuals, churches, colleges, systems, civic infrastructure, flood management, climate prevention, roads.
It takes $30,000 for Serve Pro to do just one of these houses on mold remediation.
I’m asking you to rise to the occasion of heroic virtue and prove — by your actions, not words — that you will not suck Southern Illinois and Little Egypt dry, but are there to help. Though not in the current administration, we have experienced competent governing like this in NYC in the past. We also did in Joplin during the tornado, where the community rallied together. As you know well, it’s what competent governing looks like everywhere: let your kindness help in this moment.
Condescend to the form of a servant. Let your humility and grace be evident to all and leave the cameras and journalists behind on this one. Show up for wonderful Riverland where the Ozark Mountains and Appalachia meet. Show up for Salem, show up for Little Egypt. Show up in person, and show up with the state representatives, senators, and national politicians.
For all of you lovely readers reading over my shoulder here, I’ve changed the Starlings donation page in case you’d like to donate directly to families we know in Little Egypt affected by the storms. I’ll make sure it gets to the right place, count on it.
Additionally, any cent earned from the sales of Bell Hammers this month of April — my birth month — will go to that fund. The highest royalties come from direct audiobook purchases. Libraries and bookstores specifically: I get $26 for every audiobook, so if you know a librarian, that’s a very quick way to r ack up some donations from civic funds:
- Audiobook ASIN: 979-8822650206
- Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1949547047
- Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1949547023
Additionally, each and every subscription from this month will go towards aid:
If you readers here ever have or ever will even remotely consider sharing one of these entries, this is the one. This is the time. This one’s not about me at all: spread the word now. We need both you, the reader, and powerful folk like JB Pritzker.
Help them. Let’s help them, please.
Unconditional love, respect, and confidence from here at The End—
Lancelot
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