This story is part of America @ 250: The Questions Before Us, a series from IPM News and the Illinois Student Newsroom.
URBANA — A birthday is a time for celebration and reflection: Where have we been? Where are we right now? And where are we going?
IPM is celebrating America’s 250th birthday by inviting people from across east-central Illinois to share what they think are the most important questions facing Americans at this historic moment.
John Martin is a lifelong Urbana resident and a retired software engineer who worked for nearly 40 years at the University of Illinois Foundation. Martin describes himself as deeply patriotic and identifies himself with the Make America Great Again movement.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I’m officially a townie. I grew up out of rural Urbana. I went to Urbana schools. Went to Parkland College for my training in data processing and retired. My career was here, actually at the University of Illinois Foundation for almost 40 years. Software engineer, I think was the fancy word for it.
My dad served in World War II. Mom was very patriotic as well. She was a nurse in the Naval Nurse Corps, I think they called it.
Driving by my house, I tend to put up the bunting before Memorial Day and leave it up till after Labor Day. I have a flagpole. The American flag is on top and occasionally some different secondary flags. One of my favorite flags, so to speak, second always to the American flag, was my “Let’s Go Brandon” flag. I had the Gadsden flag, the Second Amendment rights, “Don’t Tread on Me” up on occasion.
So, at this juncture of 250 years, what I see now is a divided country, but I’m an optimist at heart and I’m hopeful that we will get better over time.
And so, I think the question is, how do we heal from the wounds of a wide-open border where we took in immigrants and abuser of benefits and such from all over the world in a way that wasn’t a natural desirable way to grow.
You know, we had a period of uncontrolled illegal immigration, fences torn down, people pouring in, forces overwhelmed at the border, and we’ve turned that tide with you know, ICE and Border Patrols. And so, I believe we’re in the middle of the cleansing process to turn back what the Biden administration allowed. So, we’re in the midst of that cleansing process, I feel.
There’s a certain amount of purge that has to happen, I believe, till we get to back to a fresh beginning, okay? A managed, a planned way of people coming here would be a good thing.
I would consider myself to be part of the “Make America Great Again” movement. I feel that the January 6th debacle, I would say, was an orchestrated effort by Nancy Pelosi and others to bring Trump down.
I worked in computers, so I know what can happen behind the scenes that nobody really knows about. That seems to have happened in 2020 when either paper ballots were pre-printed ahead of time and shoved through the machines and the machines counted or someone else had access to the counts and were able to tweak it afterwards.
But if you see all of a sudden at three in the morning all of a sudden the blue line pops up and Joe Biden has won, that has to raise doubts.
So, yeah, there’s all kinds of subversive things that can and has happened because all the hands that are on the on the dials, on the keyboards. For instance, electronic voting — how can anyone go back and prove how my ballot looked like? Did they really count the way I wanted them to? And um that’s why paper ballots are important.
If it’s all electronic, mail-out ballots and you have people that are deceased, and their ballots still go to the address that’s shown, and people [say], ‘Geez, there’s an extra ballot. I’ll just go ahead and turn it in. I won’t get caught. Nobody will know the difference.’
Well, we as a culture know the difference, I think.
I’d love to remain an optimistic person the rest of my life. Smile, I try to put on a happy face. A lot of times, I think it’s important to just show happiness, show goodness, show the world that you don’t have to be down. Things don’t always have to be so negative, and whether it’s public education or cultural norms, if we can come back to… when I say “Make America Great Again”, I believe that when I was a kid, things were pretty great.
I have memories of easier times, of better times, of less tumultuous, more respectful times. So, how do we heal those wounds and bring people into alignment and one vision of what the country should be like?
Editor’s Note: Multiple reports, investigations and court rulings have found no evidence of fraud, ballot manipulation or interference in the 2020 election. Official reports have also found no evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was orchestrated to target President Trump.
This story was reported and produced for IPM News by Charles “Stretch” Ledford. If you have an idea for the America @ 250 series or would like to be featured in an upcoming story, contact Charles “Stretch” Ledford at stretch@illinois.edu.