Editor’s Note

This is a milestone to celebrate – hiring our new CEO, naming a new editor and changing to a nonprofit company. It’s good, and brave, of Kate McKenzie to join us on our journey, and I thank my colleague, Michelle Ownbey, for taking on new challenges as executive editor. I’m grateful to both for taking […]

It’s good that the community mental health board referendum won approval on its first attempt, shortening the time when public funds will help to repair a broken system. Many helped to win passage for the ballot measure, but it was the Massey Commission, formed in September 2024, in the wake of Sonya Massey’s killing in […]

Mandy Eaton, the president and CEO of Memorial Health, said Wednesday, March 11, the hospital system is working to increase access to outpatient mental health care, “but there are gaps” in the care system. Those gaps “shift pressure” to the emergency room and law enforcement. Dr. Ted Clark, an emergency room physician and vice president […]

“Yes, we may be speaking to the choir,” said Dr. Kelly Hurst, a leader of the Massey Commission, to the March 2 quarterly meeting of Kenniebrew-McNeese Community Forum. “But remember, the choir needs rehearsal.” The “choir” here was doctors, hospital workers, social service providers, city officials and staffers and other community members who care about […]

“A Forum on the City Garbage Ordinance,” the title of a recent Springfield public meeting, sounded like a recipe for complaints about disastrous public policy. Everybody knows, don’t we, that the city’s trash collection system, using multiple private haulers, leaves many households without regular pickups, an invitation for fly-dumping? Not so, says the Independent Coalition […]

Ryan P. Burge was pastor of an American Baptist church in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, for 17 years before his church closed for good in 2024. Since then he has become an influential political scientist, teaching at Washington University, while writing books about what happened to his church and many others like it. He’s been on […]

Cairo, the small Illinois town (population 2,100) with a large legacy, is claiming its place at the confluence of rivers and history. It is a landmark on the state’s Freedom Trail, celebrating the “physical and spiritual pathways of freedom-seekers.” Don Patton, a lifelong resident of Cairo and president of the Cairo Historical Preservation Project, led […]

The one good thing about radical politicians is that they tend to bring us in the center closer together. The days when politics used to divide between “conservatives” and “liberals” seem almost quaint today, when many of us would prefer a good old-fashioned conservative or even a God-and-country liberal any day over the wildfire coming […]

It’s Christmas and the country is falling apart. A week ago South Carolina seceded from the union; a month ago he was elected president. Reporters and job-seekers have flocked to Springfield to see the president-elect, who remains cool, practicing what was called then “a masterly inactivity” as he awaits the trouble and responsibility ahead of […]

In Springfield Monday Gov. JB Pritzker set the right tone for this season when he and other Jewish leaders assembled to light the state menorah. He first expressed his grief about the mass shooting in Australia which killed 15 at a Hanukkah celebration. Pritzker said he is angry “at those who stoke the embers of […]

We who are “upsessed” about Washington must resist being distracted from Springfield and local affairs. It was here our Vachel Lindsay in 1914 preached “the new localism”: “The things most worthwhile are one’s own hearth and neighborhood. We should make our own home and neighborhood the most democratic, the most beautiful and the holiest in […]

“Accountability, without systemic transformation, is not justice,” the Massey Commission writes in its elegant “Response to the Grayson Verdict,” posted on the commission’s page on Sangamon County’s website (sangamonil.gov). The Oct. 29 verdict brings a “breath of hope” and a “whisper of justice,” the statement reads. “We are called now to listen to the pain […]