I Love Illinois. I Love America. I Refuse to Stop.

My State of the State Address

Today, I delivered my annual State of the State address to the Illinois legislature. I talked about how Illinoisans’ love of our country has been our most powerful tool against authoritarianism – from the Pullman Strike to Trump’s invasion of our state.

What does it look like to love your country? In Illinois it looks like a human chain formed around a church to make it safe for immigrants to exercise their freedom of religion. It looks like whistles in the pockets of parents in the pickup line who are ready to protect their neighbors. It looks like the heavy coats worn by protesters standing up for America’s values in the dead of winter. That love is louder than the hate and cruelty that seek to destroy it.

I love my state. I love my country. I refuse to stop.

I hope you’ll watch the sections of my speech below. And whether through organizing, protesting, or standing up for our neighbors, let’s all commit to loving America in the year ahead.

A year ago, I stood before you and asked a provocative question: After we have discriminated against, disparaged and deported all our immigrant neighbors — and the problems we started with still remained – what comes next?

Some of you walked out when I asked that question.

But a year later, we have an answer – don’t we? Masked, unaccountable federal agents — with little training — occupied our streets, brutalized our people, tear gassed kids and cops, kidnapped parents in front of their children, detained and arrested and at times attempted to deport US citizens, and killed innocent Americans in the streets.

Illinois was the canary in the coal mine for what we saw happen in Minnesota.

It’s a playbook as old as the game – overwhelm communities, provoke fear, suggest that those tasked with enforcing the law are also above it, and drip authoritarianism bit by bit into our veins in the hopes that we won’t notice we are being poisoned by it.

The problem for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller was that Illinoisans did notice.

Last year was not the first time a President has tried to subdue the Illinois population with hired thugs. In 1894, when the Pullman workers walked off their railroad jobs to protest a 25% cut in their wages, President Grover Cleveland, who at the time was serving the second of his two nonconsecutive terms, deputized 5,000 US Marshals and ordered Federal Guard troops into Blue Island to end the strike. On July 3rd, 1894 – those Marshals provoked a confrontation.

Police Superintendent Michael Brennan described the federalized marshals in this manner: “They were dangerous to the lives of the citizens on account of their careless use of pistols. They fired into the crowd of bystanders when there was no disturbance, and no reason for shooting.” A report from the Chicago Record newspaper read, “In regard to most of the deputy marshals, they seemed to be hunting trouble all the time.”

Sound familiar?

The strike fizzled after 25 people had been shot and killed and many more wounded. But Governor Altgeld never forgot President Cleveland federalizing troops against Illinoisans. Six months later when he delivered his message to the General Assembly, Altgeld devoted fully half of those sixty pages to the events surrounding the Pullman Strike. His anger at the federal government’s overreach jumps off the page even 131 years later:

“If the President can, at his pleasure, send troops into any city, town, or hamlet…whenever and wherever he pleases, under pretense of enforcing some law — his judgment, which means his pleasure being the sole criterion — then there can be no difference whatever in this respect between the powers of the President and those of…the Czar of Russia.”

If we have the courage to confront all of our past, it will inform a better future.

I have joked with many of you that I wish I could spend just one year of my governorship presiding over precedented times. I yearn for normal problems. It was a conversation I had more than once with my friend, the late Governor Jim Edgar. Jim and I didn’t share the same political party, but we did share something far more important – a fierce love of our country, and our state.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about love – about loving people and loving your country and the power involved in both.

Love is an affliction – it is the most fortifying of our emotions and the most debilitating. It refuses to ground itself in logic or reason. Its very existence enriches us even though its presence always creates chaos in our lives. Love is a superpower – it teaches the brittle to bend, it shows the selfish how to share, it grants courage to the coward.

Once sparked, love becomes momentum. It’s the sled gathering speed down the hill, it’s the drop of water as it tips over the falls, it’s glitter out of a bottle.

The bravest thing any of us will ever do in this life is to love without promise of reciprocation. Because love’s ferocity does not dim with rejection. Try to banish love to a shadow and it will only reach harder for the sun.

I know, right now, there are a lot of people out there who love their country and feel like their country is not loving them back. I know that.

I also know that love unrequited can break a heart made fragile by dashed hope.

Which is why it’s important for me to stand before you today and tell you that your country is loving you back – just not in the way you are used to hearing.

It’s not speaking in anthems or flags or ostentatious displays of patriotism. It will never come from the people who say the only way to love America is to hate Americans.

Love is found in every act of courage – large and small – taken to preserve the country we once knew. You will find it in homes and schools and churches and art. It is there; it has not been squashed.

Over the last 12 months, I’ve heard love start to shout here in Illinois. I heard it from the bicyclers who showed up in Little Village every day during Operation Midway Blitz to buy out tamale carts so the vendors could return to the safety of their homes. I heard it from the parishioners who formed human chains around churches so that immigrants could worship. I heard it from the moms in the school pick up line who whipped out their cameras and their whistles. I saw it in the face of every Midwesterner who put on their heaviest coat and protested outside on the coldest day.

I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans, my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy or political party. We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization rooted in empathy and kindness — or one rooted in cruelty and rage.

What you choose to arm yourself with in this fight – love or hate – exposes which side you are fighting on. Only the weakest of people believe that love is the weakest of weapons.

And it turns out that love actually is all around – and that those who think that cruelty can destroy it, are incapable of understanding the power of a nation moved by it.

I love my country. I refuse to stop. The hope I have found in a very difficult year is that love is the light that gets you through a long night.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the great state of Illinois.