And I know what you mean about 'Chicago and IL'. We fled Chi and 75 for DuPage County and now its slowly being infested. (I still worked in Chi for many ways but could get away from 'it' for a while anyway)
And a while back, I also met some folks from down Marion way. Wow! I thought I detested the Chi Pols. They feel like political prisoners in a gulag.
I grew up in Chi and we'd joke that 10 miles South of Joliet 'was like being in Kentucky'. Well the joke was on us.
As the influence of the Miner's Union has waned over the past two decades,
what was once a rather heavily southern democrat area has turned increasingly to the right.
There's always been an almost universal antipathy toward Chicago,
and the escalating CF in the city only reinforces that intrastate friction.
During the Civil War, there was way more than a little Confederate sympathy down there, some of my greats among them.
Much of that attitude remains to this day, and is fed by the increasing anarchy within the northern ghetto entitlement crowd.
Add in the state's veritable gutting of the 2nd Amendment and your Marion friends' gulag feeling is totally understandable.