We learned about the local highschool football

Weposed in front of the fifteen-foot-tall statue of Superman at the center of Metropolis. Weheard about all the young people who were moving to the big cities becausemanufacturing and coal-mining jobs were disappearing. We learned about the local highschool football teams’ prospects for the coming season, and the vast distances veteranshad to drive in order to reach the closest VA facility. We met women who had beenmissionaries in Kenya and greeted me in Swahili, and farmers who tracked the financialpages of the Wall Street Journal before setting out on their tractors. Several times a day,I pointed out to Dan the number of men we met sporting white linen slacks or silkHawaiian shirts. In the small dining room of a Democratic party official in Du Quoin, Iasked the local state’s attorney about crime trends in his largely rural, almost uniformlywhite county, expecting him to mention joy-riding sprees or folks hunting out of season. 　　“The Gangster Disciples,” he said, munching on a carrot. “We’ve got an all-whitebranch down here—kids without jobs, selling dope and speed.” 　　By the end of the week, I was sorry to leave. Not simply because I had made so manynew friends, but because in the faces of all the men and women I’d met I had recognizedpieces of myself. In them I saw my grandfather’s openness, my grandmother’s matter-of-factness, my mother’s kindness. The fried chicken, the potato salad, the grape halvesin the Jell-O mold—all of it felt familiar. 　　It’s that sense of familiarity that strikes me wherever I travel across Illinois. I feel itwhen I’m sitting down at a diner on Chicago’s West Side. I feel it as I watch Latinomen play soccer while their families cheer them on in a park in Pilsen. I feel it when I’mattending an Indian wedding in one of Chicago’s northern suburbs. 　　Not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike. 　　I don’t mean to exaggerate here, to suggest that the pollsters are wrong and that ourdifferences—racial, religious, regional, or economic—are somehow trivial. In Illinois,as is true everywhere, abortion vexes. In certain parts of the state, the mention of guncontrol constitutes sacrilege. Attitudes about everything from the income tax to sex onTV diverge wildly from place to place.