This story is part of America @ 250: The Questions Before Us, a series from IPM News and the Illinois Student Newsroom.
CHAMPAIGN — 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.
Lance Dixon is a husband, a father of five and the owner of Dixon Graphics in Champaign.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
A republic requires people of good faith, requires a constituency that pays attention, people who participate in things like elections and in the institutions that kind of run our communities at a local level, all the way up to a national level.
Growing up, I never thought that our institutions were as fragile as they are today. I thought our society was rock solid, our democracy, you know, our courts, the way we govern ourselves, our elections.
But recently I’ve been kind of shaken and I realized how fragile they are, especially if nobody stands up to what’s happening now, which is I feel we have an authoritarian government and it’s basically due to one man, the president, who’s in office right now.
And I’m shocked and honestly frightened by how his party is allowing the disintegration of our institutions. At the last presidential election, I was… I got on a bus and my wife and I went to Michigan and we were canvassing for Kamala Harris. And on the way home it was late at night. The bus had to stop for gas. So everybody got out of the bus. We walked into the gas station and the attendant behind the cash register said, “So what’s what’s this group doing? What are you guys coming from?” And one of the ladies who was on our bus said, oh, we just came back from Michigan. We’re canvassing for Kamala Harris.
Now, mind you, this was the Saturday before the election. This election is on Tuesday. And the woman said, Who’s Kamala Harris? And that just shocked me because this was, I think, about eleven o’clock at night on a Saturday, obviously a low-wage job, probably no benefits. And that person had no clue that there was a presidential election in three days. And if she did know that there was an election, didn’t know who the candidates were.
And now I don’t even blame that person because the way things are right now, everyone is so concerned with working two or three jobs so that they can cover their rent, their food, their utility bills. People don’t have the capacity to really pay attention. The vast majority of us are just toiling away and barely making ends meet. So I understand it’s hard to pay attention. But, you know, we all know how this last election worked out. And, um, and that’s making everything worse for anyone who’s not a millionaire or a billionaire.
America is a melting pot. My grandmother moved to America from Italy when she was just a child, like two, two or three years old, and found her way to Chicago. I grew up in Oak Lawn, and my high school was a Catholic preparatory seminary on the south side of Chicago. And, the students there were expected to be open to becoming Catholic priests. And I was at the time when I was younger, I wanted to be a priest.
It was a very diverse school. There were white, black, Hispanic and Asian students. And so I got to meet and become friends with people of all kinds of backgrounds. Right now, there’s a there’s a bent towards this whole white Christian nationalism thing and that’s not the America I grew up in. The America I grew up in was that melting pot. We are a nation of multiple religions, multiple ethnic backgrounds, people who have come here from all over the world.
And so I think my first question would be, do you value that? Does a multicultural country joined together by the idea of democracy, a republic… is that important to you? What do we need to do to keep that strong? And then the other question I would ask is, how can we make adjustments so that authoritarianism doesn’t come back? You know, what can we do to ensure that one person can’t control government the way he is today?
This story was reported by A. Oishii Basu 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.