Cairo, Illinois Reflects a Reality that Hope Alone Cannot Repair

Peter H. King writing for the Los Angeles Times has spent some time in Cairo, Illinois and has found a town that is dying despite its proximity to rail road links and a levee protected location where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers flow together. But it seems the community can't catch a break; growth and opportunity have failed to find a means to bring economic life to the town located at the southernmost tip of Illinois that is bordered by Missouri and Kentucky. Barack Obama visited Cairo when he was a candidate for U.S. Senator from Illinois and referred to it as a place that delineates the "confluence of the free and the enslaved, the world of Huck and the world of Jim." The description is apt because Cairo is one of those American towns "where the North ends and the South begins," where runaway slaves took to the rivers to gain their freedom in the North. Cairo also saw its share of civil rights "marches and boycotts and sometimes bloodshed that erupted in the late 1960s and lasted several years." As far as its status as a growing, vibrant town, "Cairo's run as a rollicking river town was replaced long ago by a relentless decline that has left its commercial district pretty much a ghost town. Abandoned buildings run for blocks. Some are so long gone that trees have taken root inside and pushed their branches through the brick walls. The marquee on the Gem Theater, once the town pride, reads: "Wel me T Hist ric C i . . . Cairo's sole factory has been closed, along with many of its retail outlets. Residents not on public aid must commute elsewhere for work. Young people tend to leave and not come back, often joining the military after high school." Mayor Judson Childs, the town's first black mayor voices a pessimism brought on by a hard and difficult life when the subject turns to Obama and the possibility for change. "I think sometimes we are putting too much on the president-elect. You know, I would not like to compare myself to Obama, but this is Cairo, and as the first black mayor everybody thinks, 'Well, we got Judson now and so now we will get so-and-so and so-and-so.' " Childs sadly reminisces about his first day as mayor when people beseeched him for work. "I said, 'Well I can't put you to work. In fact, we are talking about laying some off.' After that, the popularity ratings just started down." Cairo's economic troubles have been a long time coming: "the town's decline became inevitable after World War II as long-haul trucking and air freight began to overtake commercial river traffic." Still there is a faint bit of hope that Obama might be able to help fix the troubles that plague Cairo and perhaps its residents might witness, in Mayor Childs words of possibly: "attracting just one modest employer to town -- 20, 25 employees, nothing more -- a trailblazer to establish the path for others. Even that has proved difficult. He inherited a $1.3-million hole in the municipal budget, which has made it difficult to finance the improvements needed to attract new business. City Manager Preston Ewing Jr., turned Childs' hopes into the reality that faces desperate towns like Cairo: "with competition now keen among cities, "you have to buy jobs now. You have to give them land. You have got to give them tax breaks. You have got to give them utility breaks. You got to build roads. . . . But is that not a reflection of America today? Where are the jobs going? Overseas, because that is where the best deal is, where they are paying people so little money. So," the City Manager of Cairo explained, "Cairo really is just a microcosm of what America faces now." And in a nation struggling to recover from a recession that foreshadows a possible downward spiral into a depression; there is a great deal of fear among Americans. There is the fear that this country just might not survive and never approach the promise it held just a few short years ago. For those who have yet to feel the despair witnessed by the townspeople of Cairo, Illinois and towns similarly economically depressed; the future may not be so bright. As a nation we can only hope that the right decisions are made in Washington to stave off the darkness that lingers about us with threatening sky's of a greater economic storm to come.