In 1991, when East St. Louis Mayor Carl Officer lost the election to Gordon Bush after three terms as mayor, he could have simply called Bush and conceded. Instead, he went to Bush’s victory celebration, walked through the crowded room of Bush supporters, joined him on stage and congratulated him. That’s called class, folks.
When ESL Mayor Alvin Parks Jr. recently lost his mayoral seat to Emeka Jackson-Hicks by a landslide (over 1,100 votes), he pouted for two days before begrudgingly calling her to concede.
Parks then went on to describe the election as a “heist” that was perpetrated by the Illinois Supreme Court and a “disenfranchisement” of ESL voters. Recall that Parks was kicked off the ballot for having insufficient signatures on his nominating petitions, forcing Parks to run as a write-in candidate.
That, my friends, is called being a classless, sore loser. Parks will be moving out of East Boogie City Hall in May because he was a poor, unaccomplished mayor whose arrogance, sense of entitlement, poor campaigning and underestimation of his opponent’s resolve became his undoing.
Parks stated that the lesson he learned from his election loss was that if he had it to do over that he “would have done extra checking” (of the signatures). Yeah, and if my aunt were a man then she’d be my uncle.
The real lesson that Parks fails to comprehend is that rhetoric without results will always end in defeat.
Eight years of preaching “Life More Abundantly,” with a city that looks like the results of a bombing campaign in Iraq, rings hollow.
ESL voters overwhelmingly rejected Parks because they were tired of being lied to, tired of the same cheesy message, tired of his failure to protect their only hospital or close deadly nightclubs, despite the constant pleas of grieving families and U.S. Senator Dick Durbin.
Parks lost the mayoral election because his loyalty shifted from the citizens of ESL to the “public serpents” who run the St. Clair County Democratic machine. He made that gamble and crapped out as mayor.
Parks characterized the landslide defeat as a “victory because we fought valiantly during a time when everyone else had given us up for dead.” No statement could be more egocentric and delusional.
The good news is that ESL’s new mayor, Emeka Jackson-Hicks, appears to be a more humble public servant who realizes that she has a tough road ahead, but plans to be more transparent and inclusive of the voters.
When I spoke with her on election night she informed me that she was more of a doer than a talker.
And after eight years of nothing but rhetoric, a mayor who walks her talk would be a refreshing change of pace. But we shall see.
Email: jtingram_1960@yahoo.com; Twitter@JamesTIngram.
