I make a point of taking a walk out by the Alma Mater when the first big snow hits Champaign. It’s picturesque, but that’s only the first part of what brings me there. I like to watch the people who aren’t from Illinois as they spill out from the buildings. It never fails: there is always a bundle of new residents who forget themselves and the cold to slide around in our winter weather. I wish, sometimes, that I could be from somewhere else, to see snow as something out of the ordinary. But it only lasts for a little while, people go back inside, and I walk home.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what makes Illinois so different from other places. I lived elsewhere and moved back, and that’s when I started to notice that there is something special about this state. Well, the Midwest tends to produce homespun, good-natured peoples; it’s almost a stereotype. It might be the seasons. Once a year everything around us dies, goes quiet, and gets covered over in sheets of ice. Then, a few months later, all the ice melts and turns the landscape green. It puts life into perspective, and keeps us hopeful.

Lots of other places have temperate weather, but I think it’s a start. Our state also houses a great variety of American livelihoods. The second city lives right next to epic expanses of farmland. And when a man who has worked one patch of land for his whole life can stand next to a captain of industry and say, “We are cut from the same stock,” well that’s something.

It might come from our shared history. From the ashes of the great fire, our favorite city rose up and became greater. We sent 250,000 of our young men to take back the South, and paid a share of the blood-debt to our forgotten citizens. And under an unassuming college football field, we started the spark that would end the last Great War.

Now, it might be something as simple as the good people that came before us. Illinois made that quiet young man who found the nation in its darkest hour, raised it up, and was called the Great Emancipator. The stockyards of the south side made the last of the big city bosses; the mayor that would put a gentle Irish-Catholic senator from Massachusetts in our highest office. Our little hamlet of Dixon made that paragon of the modern conservative, whose reputation remains so indispensable for the Republican cabal. And it’s not done making presidents just yet.

On the one hand, all of these things are exactly what makes Illinois something different. On the other hand, maybe it’s just snow. Maybe we can walk by the alma mater on a snowy evening and say to ourselves, I remember when I used to get excited about that. But why don’t we get excited anymore? After all, there is so much to be excited about. In a very real sense, it’s because the great rallying spirit of our tradition died. We lament this so much that some of us refuse to accept its passing, and some of us have stopped caring. Because we have lost the thing that held meaning to us before, it will never be the same again and we should just give up.

I don’t accept that, and neither should you. That something about Illinois that makes us different from everywhere else is still there, and still exciting. We can see it in each other at the football games, we can hear it on the Altgeld chimes, and we all carry it around within us. Our spirit may be dead and quiet right now, but it will be renewed in due time. However, it can’t be done without effort. And right now, those who could renew our spirit are dragging their feet.

So, what will bring our spring? Even in the winter of our spirit, we have the potential for rebirth. When our collective conviction is strong enough, and our pride bubbles over again, then we’ll have a new symbol. I’m ready.

Justin is a senior in religious studies. He is from Illinois.