I have lived in Crest Hill for 3 years now and am still unable to figure out why everyone seems to be so defensive of their city and so opposed to any other city. Every political entity that covers multiple cities seems to have their oppinions divided by those municipal boundries. This is not something I have really seen as much elsewhere.
District 205 (Lockport Township HS) seems forever divided by Lockport vs. Homer Glen. People in Lockport do not feel that a school in their district is theirs if it is in Homer Glen. And Homer Glen residents seem to have a chip on their shoulder that the district and the current schools bear the Lockport name.
The Des Plaines Valley Library District serves 70,000 people, but feels it needs 3 libraries to do so. Or more accurately feels that it needs to build a library in each city served if they are going to be able to get a building referendum passed. One library could serve the entire district, as long as the State sees fit to leave the bridges open and to even possibly build an addtional one someday. That would of course mean the library would be in one city and not the other two. The residents of the other two cities could not stand for that. They would scream that they were paying for another city's library. Of course they ignore the fact that they would still use it regardless of city boundries.
I can imagine if we all functioned the way that residents of this area do. We would insist that if the federal government wants to build an office building, they had better build one in every city becuase we will not support Washington DC's buildings with our tax dollars. And we should stop building highways that are driven on by people from other parts of the country. Sure we are all one country, but why should Arizona get a new "elite" highway that we have to pay for? They should break off and form a new nation and build their own highway!
I do not know why this attitude is so strong here. Why are we so protective of our cities and so opposed to our neighbors? Especially since so many of our local governments cross city borders. Our school districts, park districts, fire protection districts, library districts and townships cross municipal boundries. These entities provide us far more services than our cities do and should tie us together. And then we must ask the question of why can we go just a little west and see a different attitude? The four high schools with Plainfield in their names serve kids from a number of surrounding communities and there has been no outcry about their names and no one complains that Plainfield taxpayers built a school that is attended by kids from Joliet.
