1) The town is full of young blacks who spend their nights shooting each other in order to impress their “brotha’s” back in Chicago where most of them were born.

2) The town is also full of hillbillies who populate the dark corners of the Walmart and the shady corners of the streets in fair weather, displaying FEED ME signs. The police simply ignore them.

3) The town council is busy loading their pockets from pointless community projects while the small but busy working class pay higher taxes to support them and their Harvard bound children.

4) The once respected university has become a known nest for gangs from Chicago. On campus violence is a common event.

5) The doctors are horrible quacks who are barely out of high school. They work out of corporate clinics that look like hotels for the mad and loony. Appointments take hours and hours, while prescriptions are almost always written wrong to the patients. If you are not very very healthy, don’t come here!

6) Everyone drives crazy, fast and reckless, like it is a Chicago expressway even though the real non student, live-here population is barely that of any other small town in America.

7) If you like tornadoes, you will love Southern Illinois. (Even better is the monthly test sirens!)

8) No one has ever heard of SIU Carbondale, or Carbondale itself. The local newspaper is called the Southern “Illusion” on the street and it only reports our own local street violence and how great the town council is.

9) Once you are here, you may be stuck here forever because you will never make enough cash to buy a ticket out.

10) The police are deathly afraid to do anything wrong against the black population, which has taken over the street corners and the main strip of bars and businesses downtown at night.

WARNING: If you, or one of your family or friends are considering a move to Carbondale, Illinois, regardless of how temporary that they say the move will be for, yes even those with an eye on attending the unheard of Southern Illinois University, please, please beg them to look elsewhere. Before they come here and fall into the dark nasty pit that we must call home, at least for now (the dream of moving far away still lives in some of us).

Sincerely,
long time Carbondale citizen (for now)