Adam Kinzinger’s Family Letter Is Nasty, Cruel, and Familiar
I’ve received a few myself—and it’s time to let Trump-loyalist relatives go
Adam Kinzinger is a Republican congressman from Illinois representing roughly the Rockford area, an area that voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Kinzinger didn’t grow up in Rockford, though; he grew up in Normal, Illinois, home of Illinois State University, where he went to college before joining the Air Force and flying missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I know Normal. It’s about an hour and a half from my hometown of Mattoon, and when I was in high school, Normal played baseball in our conference. We swept a doubleheader from them my senior year. Kinzinger is roughly my age, a couple of years younger. He might have been on that team. We’re both central Illinois kids. So even though I’ve never met Kinzinger, I feel like I know Kinzinger. I know where he’s from, I know that he left, and I know what that means—to be from there, and then leave. And I know what he’s going through right now.
I have spent most of my adult life feeling vaguely guilty about leaving my slowly eroding hometown, the place where my father grew up, the place where his father grew up; we once traced my family tree back to 1860 and discovered that my…
